1. Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
(25 Rave, 3 Positive)
“These stories return Strout to the core of what she does more magnanimously than anyone else, which is to render quiet portraits of the indignities and disappointments of normal life, and the moments of grace and kindness we are gifted in response … Omission is where you find what makes a writer a writer; it is in the silences where forgiveness and wisdom grow, and it is where Strout’s art flourishes. This new book pushes that endeavor even further … With Anything is Possible — using the sum of its parts to paint the humanity of an entire community — Strout hits the target yet again.”
–Susan Scarf Merrell (The Washington Post)
*
2. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
(23 Rave, 4 Positive)
“Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, is a love letter to an obstinate genre that won’t be gentrified. It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi, and borrowing from science fiction, queer theory and horror … Machado is fluent in the vocabulary of fairy tales — her stories are full of foxes, foundlings, nooses and gowns — but she remixes it to her own ends. Her fiction is both matter-of-factly and gorgeously queer. She writes about loving and living with women and men with such heat and specificity that it feels revelatory.”
–Parul Sehgal (The New York Times)
Read an excerpt from Her Body and Other Stories here
*
3. Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
(9 Rave, 13 Positive)
“These are ‘sad. . . lonely and troubled’ people, but many are improbably appealing; even the most twisted and tortured have recognizably human qualities … The stories, quite frankly, are not just grotesque; they are gross. Reading them is an uncomfortable experience. The squeamish and the Pollyannaish will likely find life inside Moshfegh’s world harsh, painful, torturous. But if you can stomach the discomfort, there is both piercing wit and unexpected poignancy to be found in Moshfegh’s original and resonant collection.”
–Pricilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)
Read an excerpt from Homesick for Another World here
*
4. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
(12 Rave, 5 Positive)
“The collection is full of refugees, whether from external turmoil – natural or manmade disasters – or from a deeper, more internal conflict between even those who are closest to each other. With anger but not despair, with reconciliation but not unrealistic hope, and with genuine humour that is not used to diminish anyone, Nguyen has breathed life into many unforgettable characters, and given us a timely book focusing, in the words of Willa Cather, on ‘the slow working out of fate in people of allied sentiment and allied blood?.’”
–Yiyun Li (The Guardian)
*
5. What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
(11 Rave, 3 Positive)
“A witty, oblique and mischievous storyteller, Arimah can compress a family history into a few pages and invent utopian parables, magical tales and nightmare scenarios while moving deftly between comic distancing and insightful psychological realism … Arimah’s magic realism owes something to Ben Okri’s use of spirit beliefs, while her science fiction parables, with their ecological and feminist concerns, recall those of Margaret Atwood. But it would be wrong not to hail Arimah’s exhilarating originality: She is conducting adventures in narrative on her own terms, keeping her streak of light, that bright ember, burning fiercely, undimmed.”
–Marina Warner (The New York Times Book Review)
*
6. Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
(7 Rave, 9 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Difficult Women is a dark book, pulsing with repressed anger that emerges in sudden starts and with the accompaniment of violence…It takes courage to write such a book, to bank on un-likeability, on women unraveling in such a variety of ways. In reveling in this exposure of rage, Roxane Gay charts a markedly different literary course than is routinely allotted to the ‘diverse’ or ‘minority’ female author … Gay peels it all back, exposing the raw, the enraged and the perversely beautiful.”
–Rafia Zakaria (The New Republic)
*
7. Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang
(8 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Zhang maintains a deceptive sort of control, moving backward and forward in time, scrolling through memories, lending her stories the quality of rambling monologues and concealing the seams of the exquisite design of the book as a whole, its raucous set pieces, and long, looping sentences. The result is a forceful performance and one of the knockout fiction debuts of the year … The world of the late 1980s and 1990s — the era’s crappy television shows and computer games and fast food — is something Zhang summons on the page without a false move … Zhang has transformed her narcissism and nostalgia into that most American of genres, a virtuoso song of herself.”
–Christian Lorentzen (Vulture)
*
8. The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt
(9 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Like the best short story collections, The Dark Dark chews on some delicious, evergreen themes in extraordinary ways … This is liminal fantasy with a solid literary sensibility; sure to please fans of Karen Russell and Lidia Yuknavitch. Hunt is the master of the lovely and strange tableaux vivant … she is at her best when her stories seem to almost get away from her, crescendoing into feverish, manic beauty. Horror and strangeness are her allies. But once you boil away the horror, these are stories about middle-class women imprisoned by the domestic in some way or another. Hunt’s female characters are full of deep trenches that overflow with sorrow and rage.”
–Carmen Maria Machado (NPR)
*
9. Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley
(8 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley has the gift of making small canvases inexhaustibly new. She sees unsentimentally the subtle gestures that alter people’s lives forever; and charts, too, the instances when those gestures change nothing at all … This zoom lens effect gives Hadley’s work the tenderness of wisdom: she grants readers an almost Buddhist apprehension of time’s inexorable levelling force. She captures childhood’s consuming immediacy; and with equal vividness, the confusions of young womanhood … Compassionate and luminous, Hadley sees them all — or should I say, she sees us all: our travails, our fantasies and our small joys.”
–Claire Messud (The Financial Times)
*
10. I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy
(7 Rave)
“Susan Sontag once admiringly called Jaeggy a savage writer. You need to be, to write these stories about loners and orphans with such levity. Fleur Jaeggy is like Edward Gorey without the monsters, or Lemony Snicket without the slapstick, though she can be funny, in a sinister way … A genius of rich, terse prose, Jaeggy writes paragraphs that are gorgeous labyrinths. One sentence pulls ahead, the next circles back to reexamine something from earlier, and the next one might dead-end or take you somewhere entirely new — but to the characters and the reader by extension, it all happens simultaneously … She achieves more in a paragraph than many can pull off in an entire story; there’s very little out there that resembles Jaeggy’s dark and surreal intensity.”
–Nathan Scott McNamara (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
*
