Keely Shinners’s How to Build a Home at the End of the World (Perennial Press, 2022) occupies a near-future landscape of drought and isolation, in which the U.S. population has been collectively abandoned by the state in ways not (quite) yet manifest.
Read MoreNo contemporary writer leaves me quite as terrified yet delighted as Kate McIntyre. As a fan of her wickedly witty and imaginative fiction, I’m in good company.
Read MoreThere’s nothing more American than baseball, the healthcare crisis, and gawking at high profile murders—unless you find a way to make money off all three.
Read MoreEvery writer has their obsessions, and the best short story collections lay out these obsessions like treasures for the reader. Kate Folk’s debut collection, Out There, is full of treasures that invite close examination.
Read MoreIn Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, Frida Liu leaves her baby, Harriet, alone at home for a few hours while she runs into work. This lapse in judgment changes her life.
Read MoreDavid Nelson’s debut narrative nonfiction book Boys Enter the House pays literary homage to the victims of John Wayne Gacy. Over the past four decades, Gacy has become a household name in the arsenal of serial killers, but little attention has been made in relation to the victims—who they were, what they loved.
Read MoreA memoir is interesting either because of the story or how it’s told—Victoria Buitron’s A Body Across Two Hemispheres is both. It’s little wonder this debut memoir-in-essays won the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize.
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