In the most recent volume of the New England Review, I was stopped in my tracks by a novella by Lori Ostlund called "Just Another Family," which starts out with a great deal of humor and…

Every year I read The Pushcart Prize, one of three annual anthologies that contains a selection of writing published in magazines and journals. The Pushcart Prize combines stories, poems, and…

This novel is all voice and what a voice it is! Acerbic, irreverent, anti-everything but mostly anti-male, it is also witty, funny and very, very smart. It's the voice of a young woman who is judgmental…

TransAtlantic is a novel with a generous reach, but a hidden purpose. This is what makes it a powerful reading experience. I am calling it an experience because it's a novel you will read slowly,…

Take What You Need, Idra Novey's most recent novel, is a stunning piece of work. Consisting of three complex, beautifully drawn characters, the novel is about caretaking relationships. Jean…

Jane has an unusual passion. She is a paleobiologist who believes that bringing the woolly mammoth back to life will stop the ice from disappearing in the Artic. The theory is that when this prehistoric…

I wanted to write about The Pachinko Parlor, Elsa Shua Dusapin's story about an immigrant Korean community in Japan that runs Korean gaming parlors, because the novel so successfully reveals…

Birnam Wood is the new novel by the New Zealand writer, Eleanor Catton, a literary author who crosses into mystery and suspense. Her previous novel, The Luminaries, was a brick of…

Few people write long short stories these days and one of the reasons may be that they are so hard to get published. Many quarterlies prefer to publish briefer stories to showcase more writers. And…

Most of the stories in Hilma Wolitzer's newly published collection were written in the nineteen seventies, but the humor and wit that electrifies each one feels timeless, and relative to our present,…