Literary fiction with fantastical elements. The author is from Argentina and the book was translated from Spanish. A girl in a poor neighbourhood of Buenos Aires responds to her mother’s death by compulsively eating dirt. As she gets older, it becomes clear that when she eats earth associated with someone who has been murdered or …
Literary fiction. Short stories. I don’t generally orient my reading via prizes, but the fact that this collection won the latest Giller Prize is probably why it was prominent enough in my awareness that, after my partner borrowed it from a colleague, I spontaneously picked it up and read it as well. Stories of everyday …
Literary fiction. Race, class, gender, and nonmonogamy. Follows a 23 year-old Black woman who begins the book as a low-level employee at a publisher in New York and who leads what you might describe as a sexually abundant but relationally poor life. The book begins as she starts dating a relatively well-off older white man …
Literary fiction. Ranges from China to Salt Lake City to the back woods roads of the northern US, but mostly it orbits a pre-apocalyptic and apocalyptic New York City. Though this book was published a couple of years ago, the apocalypse in question is 2020-appropriate – a pandemic, in this case a fungal infection that …
Literary fiction. I really like Brand’s writing but, for whatever reason, it has been quite a few years since I last read any, so I was very happy to sink my teeth into this one. The narrator describes three love affairs that take place as she attempts to finish her doctoral dissertation. As someone who …
Short stories. Literary. Weird. Translated from Japanese. Many of the stories feature some ordinary complaint in the life of an ordinary woman – to do with work, to do with a relationship, or something else – that is intertwined with some aspect of the world behaving in some manner that is different than we would …
Another collection of weird speculative literary short-stories – seemingly my go-to type for short fiction in the last year or two. It’s mostly about the characters, of course, but you’ll also find some time travel, a few fossils from sentient wolverine otter-ish things that lived millions of years before humans, the odd mildly irritating haunting …
Short stories. Literary. Weird. Focused on women, the body, transformation. At its best when evoking feeling and mood, particularly variations on the unsettling and the not really possible but the relentlessly true nonetheless. I’ve seen it compared to Carmen Maria Machado’s *Her Body and Other Parties*, which is apt though they explore somewhat different flavours …
Literary fiction. The story of a young man buffeted by the winds of the social world into not-belonging of many different forms, and then navigating that towards a clearer sense of self. Woven together with a storyline drawn from Hindu mythology and with black/green/grey illustrations. Simple, lyrical, and emotionally compelling. Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.