A Wyoming ghost town provides the stage for this spectacular novel from Obreht about the enduring myths of the Wild West. Read more
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Tag: Literary Fiction
‘It Will Come Back to You’ by Sigrid Nunez
One of our best, smartest, funniest authors has just published her first collection of short stories at age seventy-five … The volume mixes tone and content: its easy intimacy and impression of casualness exist in fascinating counterpoint to its philosophical heft, existential probing, and sagacious maturity. These stories can be at once effervescent and weighty, straightforward and unsettling, hilarious and eerie … Nunez’s capacity to startle, surprise, even shock her readers is deployed to extraordinary effect in many of the stories collected here. We never end up where we began with a Nunez story … Nunez’s fiction doesn’t shy away from embittering things or from confronting grief head-on, even as it offers its readers humor, warmth, sweetness — comfort in the wake of the truth. Read more
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‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner
Lerner’s lyrical narrative brims with insights into how memories take and change shape, the nature of father figures, and the ways an artist’s influence echoes through time. It’s a knockout. Read more
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Lauren Groff’s Newest Stories Prove She’s Among the Best in the Game
The stories in Lauren Groff’s third collection, “Brawler,” largely feature people who’ve hit crisis points in their lives: the abusive partner, the natural disaster, the relapse, the deathbed. This is as it ought to be with short stories, which have to make their points in a relative hurry. Groff, a perpetual bestseller, is gifted at that: Her previous collection, “Florida,” was a National Book Award finalist, along with two of her other books that earned the honor. Read more
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‘This Is Where the Serpent Lives’ by Daniyal Mueenuddin
The story threads cohere into a profound and revelatory portrait of Pakistan’s class divisions. Propulsive and peopled with unforgettable characters, this is a masterpiece. Read more
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William Maxwell’s Great American Novel
So Long, See You Tomorrow has been tipped as the new Stoner – but how did an ‘experiment in empathy’ from 1980 go viral in 2025? Read more
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‘An Oral History of Atlantis’ by Ed Park
Park’s delightful tales, which are driven by provocative ideas, strange occurrences, and gripping plots, pay tribute to the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut in the best ways. This pitch-perfect collection will linger in readers’ minds for a long time. Read more
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‘Vera, or Faith’ by Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart is one of the best comedians in literature today, and like all the great ones, his humor elucidates as much as it amuses. That’s especially true of Vera, or Faith, a richly imagined tale of a unique family in an America that is succumbing all too willingly to technology’s intrusions and the threat of oppression. Read more
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‘Fair Play’ by Louise Hegarty
Readers of both classic mysteries and literary fiction will enjoy this intermingling of the two in Louise Hegarty’s first novel, Fair Play, an utterly fresh approach to the standard whodunit that adds emotional heft to playful pastiche … Hegerty skillfully manipulates the genre, calling attention to the reader’s expectations and subverting familiar tropes in the service of nuanced storytelling. Fair Play is a thoroughly satisfying and thought-provoking read. Read more
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Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa
Ichikawa’s provocative debut chronicles a disabled woman’s sexual awakening. Shaka, a Japanese woman who lives with myotubular myopathy, a genetic disease whose symptoms include difficulty breathing and muscle weakness, is independently wealthy thanks to an inheritance from her parents. She spends her days taking online university courses and writing pornographic stories for money, which she sends to food banks and shelters for homeless young girls. Read more
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