Reviews

From lush forests to faraway kingdoms, fairy tales have long taken place in realms where enchantment is native to the landscape. Contemporary fiction, however, often treats enchantment more cautiously, filtering the magical through irony, ambiguity, or psychological realism rather than asking readers to suspend disbelief even temporarily. In his debut story collection The Bedtime Emptying …

According to philosopher and writer Albert Camus, absurdity exists somewhere between a human need and a silent world. It involves an “irrational and wild” longing for clarity and often defies meaning-making. This is the rub that writers have been sorting out for centuries—interrogating the horrors of existence, hoping to derive a semblance of meaning. Kim …

No writer does more with less than Etgar Keret. The acclaimed Israeli purveyor of micro fiction returned in 2025 with Autocorrect. Across thirty-three stories, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, Keret doesn’t so much reflect reality back to us as he does refract it, bend it, and mess about with it—and, in …

In her second story collection, Origin Stories, Corinna Vallianatos charts moments of ordinary life marked by the pressures of transition. Throughout the collection, characters navigate periods of change ranging from relocating to settling into new familial roles to contemplating shifts within themselves and the people around them. What emerges are stories whose protagonists contend with …

Reflecting decades of an extraordinary writing career, Ed Park’s new short story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, offers a reading experience akin to entering the enchanted curio cabinet of his mind. To examine its contents is an exercise that proves fascinating, slightly puzzling, and always rewarding. If there are mismatched candlesticks found inside said …

There’s a moment near the beginning of “Ten Thousand Years,” the sixth story in Greg Schutz’s debut short story collection, Joyriders, where the sober protagonist Carter drinks cream soda on his back stoop as he watches “combines drag the fields, corn crackling in their combs.” The fields will return in a horrific moment at the …

There is a moment early in Are You Happy?, the title story from Lori Ostlund’s new collection, where Phil, the story’s protagonist, reflects on his decision not to bring his partner, Kelvin, with him to visit his dying mother. Because he has not explicitly told his family about Kelvin’s existence and not talked to them about …

In his debut short story collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody, Jared Lemus assembles dynamic slice-of-life stories about men and boys living in Guatemala and its diaspora, a perspective that enriches the growing canon of Latinx lit. With eight stories set in Guatemala and four in the United States, readers accompany unassuming characters as they scrape by in their …

Henry David Thoreau once said, “Not until we’re lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” This same sentiment speaks to the heart of Allegra Hyde’s short story collection, The Last Catastrophe, an assemblage of fifteen speculative stories that creatively consider the consequences of a not-too-distant future that at times feels so resonant and eerily familiar one …

Everyone cares about something. Some people care for human life—children, parents, lovers. Some are also very passionate about inanimate objects—cell phones, computers, make up. Above all else, there is always one thing that we care about, one thing that we would push ourselves to the most challenging limits for, would defy all odds, something that …