The overarching theme is of a tactical approach to love and romance; the protagonists must all negotiate social restrictions, in varying degrees of good faith, to achieve their goals.
These five stories by Zadie Smith, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Helen Oyeyemi, Hassan Blassim, and Muna Fadil, highlight the lives of innocents tangled in the machinations of war.
Circe, the exiled sorceress and minor goddess from Homer's Odyssey, responds to the myth of Odysseus by telling us her version.
Woman at 1,000 Degrees relies on black comedy and tragedy to examine the generation "razed to the ground" by World War II.
"Some people would argue that writing stories about rebellious people is not actually an act of rebellion," says Sachdeva, "but I believe those people underestimate the extent to which we internalize a story that really moves us."
The Second Winter is an engaging but difficult read featuring characters you'll love to hate.
This ambitious and empathic debut explores complications and consequences between sisters, cultures, and mental illness.
Eventide is a compelling psychological portrait of a successful academic woman starting her personal life anew in her 40s.
Barbara Comyns' The Juniper Tree, recently reissued by the New York Review of Books, diminishes the space between fairy tale and real life.
Why do we feel a need to collect things as we travel through our lives? Alice Walker, Tim O'Brien and Lori Sambol Brody capture the importance of souvenirs in these three short stories.
There are certainly delights to be found in How to Stop Time, despite its tendency to oversimplify.
In his fifth novel, writer and musician Willy Vlautin deals with the causes and consequences of loneliness.
This debut collection of stories by Anjali Sachdeva explores how our new gods are just as untrustworthy and capricious as the old ones.
Sparked by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Borich's work is a genre-crossing meditation on bodies of land, humans, and their sometimes tempestuous connections.
Hunt turns the domestic inside out to find the supernatural lurking within.
"We were taught what we should aspire to: excelling in math and the sciences were all good because those things have almost nothing to do with politics, but if you had artistic aspirations, if you had the need to examine life…"
© 1999-2018 Popmatters.com. All rights reserved.
Popmatters is wholly independently owned and operated.
