A few years ago, I read my first Colum McCann novel, which I loved, and now, having finished his latest, Twist, I see similarities between the two that help clarify what I find compelling…

There are many things one could praise in this impressive and powerful collection: how the stories describe the many shapes love can take in our lives as well as the pressures it exerts, how the stories…

I was rereading one of my favorite novels, News of the World by Paulette Jiles, when I learned that she had just died. Her death is a great loss not only to me, but to all of her readers,…

This is a short, deceptively simple novel that delivers an expansive reading experience because it ends with the interesting question, what just happened? Narrated in the first person by a deeply introspective…

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor is a short novel that has the tense, compressed energy of a short story as it builds to an unexpected conclusion. Set on a small island off the coast of…

Lily Tuck's new novel, The Rest Is Memory is a spare and heartbreaking story about a young Polish girl who perishes at Auschwitz. A victim of Hitler's plan to eradicate the Polish population,…

The protagonist of Kaveh Akbar's debut novel, Martyr!, wants to die. This is not, as you might think, the wish of an elderly man, or a person with a terminal disease, but the preoccupation…

In this extraordinary 500 page novel Murray examines the lives of a contemporary Irish family, and though the story contains many surprising developments, nothing within the plot feels arbitrary or…

What makes Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, a sprawling political novel by Lydia Millet, so extraordinary is that it succeeds in doing something that's nearly impossible. Through a perfectly…

In the opening of Bee Sacks' aptly titled story, "The Song of the Bow," two trans men watch through the window of a coffee shop in Brooklyn as two Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox men across the street talk…