Ordinary people are haunted by loss and grief in Shahriar Mandanipour’s short story collection "Seasons of Purgatory". In these stories, death is a constant companion. For... Read More

In Norman Lock’s splendid historical novel "Tooth of the Covenant", Nathaniel Hawthorne is troubled by his ancestor’s dark legacy as a harsh, heartless judge. In 1851,... Read More

Forty years of living and boating around New England’s largest stretch of salt marsh gave Patricia Hanlon good familiarity with her local environment. However, it wasn’t... Read More

In Amanda Dennis’s melancholy literary novel "Her Here", a wounded graduate student translates the story of a fellow wanderer. Since her mother died, Elena has shuddered her... Read More

In François Dominique’s esoteric novel "Aseroë", a man ponders life, death, and the in between. Mushrooms are an ancient, inexplicable life form. Their boundary-defying... Read More

Norman Lock’s dark, carnivalesque "American Follies" mines the seamier side of the 1880s through a woman’s febrile imagination and New York sojourns. Ellen, who was once... Read More

"The Bear" is a dreamy dispatch from the end of the world. In Andrew Krivak’s palimpsest novel, the reassertion of nature over the bones of human civilization is a dignified... Read More

Set in Gilded Age New York, Norman Lock’s "Feast Day of the Cannibals" is the sixth standalone book in the American Novel series. At the cusp of the nineteenth century,... Read More

Damián Lobo is a fix-it man who’s unable to fix his own life. Middle-aged and just laid off from his dead end janitorial job, he wanders Madrid’s streets alone, imagining... Read More

In Varley O’Connor’s historical novel "The Welsh Fasting Girl", Sarah Jacob is a humdrum farm girl. When she stops eating in the 1860s, she swiftly gains notoriety... Read More

The stories in Richard Wiley’s new collection all take place in the same city among characters who share connections. They are creatively mixed and span decades and tones.... Read More

Jerome Charyn has long been a prolific writer with diverse interests, and that clearly shines through in his latest essay collection, "In the Shadow of King Saul". Both literary... Read More