Fiction

Geoffrey Dutton reviews this transfixing collection of "fictions" by Luke O’Neil that features animals large and small, perhaps the least interesting of which are Homo sapiens.

Even the sixty-six-year-old attorney Nick Milonas, the protagonist in Stephanie Cotsirilos’ novella My Xanthi, learns over thirty years of legal practice that justice has its own terrain, and sometimes jurisprudence may not be what it should be or how he expects it to act.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang breaks open the pitfalls of a publishing industry in today's cultural economy. It is an unsettling read by a masterful storyteller.

Mark Wagstaff’s new novel, On the Level, crashes the Jason Bourne films into Catcher in the Rye. Non-stop intrigue drives a coming-of-age story in which protagonist Riz Montgomery is both an unforgettably troubled, smart, and passionate fifteen-year-old and a seasoned, mysterious older woman narrating from a distant place scented by tequila and motorcycle fuel.

Furnace Creek retells the classic bildungsroman Great Expectations, exchanging Victorian England for 1960s America, arguably one of the most turbulent decades in social history.

Category Unknown by Koushik Banerjea is a dense and ambitious book that continues the conversation relaunched by the racial reckoning of 2020, "and reminds us that the conversation isn't the least bit new."

Geoffrey Dutton looks at the "book-within-a-book" literary device, as used in the 2015 novel Disclaimer— and his upcoming novel Her Own Devices.

The Regular, the new novel by Dave Buckhout, is a philosophical novel, and its main protagonist, Marvin Goodspeed, is a philosopher. That said, what is the philosophy of this modern day southern Cynic? And what, ultimately, is the book’s (and Buckhout’s) take on him?