As its title suggests, Michael H. Thompson’s debut novel, "Cop Killer", packs a wallop. Set in present-day Portland, this slim novella of sixty-four pages is harrowing in its methodical, emotionless description of one man’s revenge.... Read More

"Between Heaven and Here", the seismic new novel by Susan Straight, has received deservedly high praise from readers and reviewers alike since its release this fall by McSweeney’s Books. This haunting story, written in not one but many... Read More

The narrator in Bill Peters’s first novel, "Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality", often suffers from a “Moth-In-Sink Feeling.” This is a sensation that the book’s online glossary (maverickjetpants.com/glossary) defines as... Read More

Some writers have a gift for creating cozy scenes and comfortable locales despite a larger context of unease and violence. In her new novel "An American Tune", Barbara Shoup accomplishes this: meticulously establishing pleasant,... Read More

Cesmi Ersoz’s "Confessions of a Love Come Undone" is not a beach read. Between the explicative title and the grim artwork of the English-language edition—an unfocused couple in a street of shadows and heavily shuttered doors—the... Read More

The inattentive browser may pass on You’re Married to Her?, mistaking it for a self-help guide about the romantic pursuit of married men—or a chick-lit novel with a plucky heroine. But she would be missing out: This slim collection... Read More

In the early pages of Julian Tepper’s simultaneously fretful and funny novel, "Balls", Henry Schiller, musician, lyricist, and emotionally crooked hero writes a song about his suspicious testicular pain. “A thousand curious aches, /... Read More

“I don’t have to be happy,” realizes the hero of Pavel Kostin’s It’s Time: Writing on the Wall, a novel recently translated from Russian into English by James Rann. The story details the meanderings of an acutely introspective... Read More