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 …
This week’s New Day Tuesday release, Amy Gustine’s You Should Pity Us Instead, is a compilation of short stories being recognized as a “dazzling debut collection” by Publisher’s Weekly. The stories include an assortment of ordinary situations: a women with fifty-five cats, a father on his way to sort out his dead daughter’s apartment, a mother …