There may be no unifying theme to Josip Novakovich's The Heritage of Smoke. But underlying the brilliant short-story collection is a pattern of man's inhumanity to man. And no wonder. Author of April Fool's Day, among others, the writer hails from Croatia. Two decades ago the fleeting republic of Yugoslavia came apart at the seams. The settings may range from placid Wyoming and Iowa to devastated New York or Srebrenica. But the tone throughout is a manic despair one associates with post-traumatic stress.

One of the New York stories, "Dutch Treat", centers on the events of 9/11. Surveillance cameras catch an innocent man grinning among some grinning "Arabic-looking" shopkeepers. The man also gave someone a sizable sum of money that landed in the hands of Mohammed Atta. The Kafkaesque storyline underscores the occasional absurdities of the American surveillance state.

Another story, "Acorns," relates the rape of an American aid worker in war-torn Bosnia. As in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, the woman becomes pregnant. Should she counter the violence of rape with the violence of abortion? Or counter with love by bringing the child to term? In "Be Patient," a child falls victim to a botched vaccination. It turns out that Big Pharma tests drugs in countries with scant history of suing for malpractice. America looms large in the Yugoslavia stories, a deus ex machina with dubious motives. So too does the UN, "a bunch of sex tourists and vultures."

Other stories are notable. "When the Saints Come" concerns a man saved from cancer who travels to the Holy Land. He finds it to be barbaric and ridiculous, only to die anyway. In "Tumbleweed," a hitchhiker flags a ride with an American thinking he's from "Yugoslavakia.” The hitchhiker's intoxication leads to a clash with the law. The title story, about someone tormented by his last cigarette, recalls Zeno's Conscience.

This collection has stories about rats, Nikola Tesla and cannibalism (though not all at once). The range alone suggests genius. The author's timing is faultless and the bathos hard-won. But the genius is never far from madness and nihilism. Gallows humor abounds, akin perhaps to Hemingway's "On the Quai at Smyrna." But Novakovich's voice is wholly unique and original. Antecedents don't spring to mind.

It's not uncommon for some to administer Last Rites to the short-story form. Novakovich is a promising, even an essential, refutation.

Imagine a world where you bear children only to watch them “die” when your gaming system is hacked and requires a reboot, or where contact lenses act as social media implants that live-stream every moment of your life. These are just two of the brave new worlds that creative writing professor Alexander Weinstein has envisioned in Children of the New World, a bold debut collection of speculative short stories.

Many of the stories deal with our culture’s growing dependence on new technologies and the profound isolation and boredom that this dependence creates. In “Migration,” families are quarantined inside their houses, their needs met through total online connectivity. One day, in an act of familiar teenage rebellion, the son steps into the outside world. The frightened father follows, only to find him playing with a tennis ball. When questioned about his actions, the son responds, “You know whenever I play Tennis, the ball always bounces smoothly and makes the same sound. But that’s not what happens in real life.” This theme reappears throughout the book—characters live in tailored, ideal virtual realities, and yet they’re bored to death. Weinstein deftly captures technology’s limitations and leaves the reader to ponder the beauty found in the real world’s imperfections.

Ultimately, what is most remarkable, and chilling, about many of these stories is their resemblance to our current times. Think Her rather than “Star Trek” or Minority Report. Discomfiting as they may be, these characters’ desires and frustrations are familiar as they navigate worlds increasingly devoid of human connection. The stories in this collection, while wildly imaginative, also read as a sort of cautionary tale. As we push our dependence on new technologies further than ever before, one can’t help feeling that we may be closer to these imagined worlds than we think.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Lizzie March is not thin when we first meet her, but she desperately wants to be. A lonely high school girl with an obese, ill mother and an absent father, she avoids looking at her own body. Instead, she secretly envies female friends who are sexually bold or especially beautiful. Craving acceptance, she meets guys on Internet dating sites, and later, after dropping out of Catholic school, she brings home older men who don’t seem bothered by her weight. Eventually, she begins to diet, hoping that it will bring her the love she’s looking for.

In 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, author Mona Awad tells Lizzie’s story through 13 chapters in her life as she transforms from a chubby teen to a sleekly fit adult. Throughout these often raw, poignant stories, Awad adeptly skewers the culture of fitness and dieting, a constant battle of self-denial. Awad, who received an MFA from Brown University, illustrates the way that women unconsciously size each other up by appearance or even what they choose on a restaurant menu. For example, in one story, “The Girl I Hate,” Lizzie goes to lunch with a skinny friend who joyously eats fattening food while Lizzie—dieting—nibbles on a salad. 

Lizzie is a frustrating, funny and sad character. However, her story is a deeply true one. She exemplifies the fact that self-acceptance must come from inside ourselves, always separate from the ever-changing bodies we inhabit. Readers who appreciated last year’s Dietland shouldn’t miss this insightful debut.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, September 2015

It takes a writer of immense confidence and talent to fashion beautiful stories that chronicle ordinary people coping with devastating challenges. Adam Johnson demonstrated this talent in his novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He now does the same in Fortune Smiles, a collection of six powerful short stories in which characters are forced to contend with some of life’s biggest tragedies.

“Nirvana” is a futuristic tale in which a computer programmer who has written an algorithm that can search for videos of dead people and “summon” them cares for his joint-smoking wife, who suffers from Guillain-Barré syndrome. In the eerie “Dark Meadow,” the police ask a pedophile who owns a computer repair business to help them track down people who view child pornography on the Web. The protagonist of “Interesting Facts,” a frustrated novelist who has undergone a double mastectomy, worries about what life would be like for her husband and two children if she were to die. “Hurricanes Anonymous” tells the story of a UPS driver who returns to his van after making a FEMA delivery in hurricane-ravaged Louisiana and finds there his 2-year-old son, whom his girlfriend has abandoned. In “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine,” a former Stasi prison warden in East Germany wonders who is leaving mysterious packages on his lawn. And in the riveting title story, two defectors from North Korea struggle to adapt to the more democratic life of the South. 

Sound depressing? It could be in the hands of a lesser writer. But even in the midst of emotionally trying events, Johnson finds moments of delight, such as when the UPS driver in “Hurricanes Anonymous” changes his son’s diaper and “does [the boy’s] favorite part” by holding the talcum dispenser up high and letting the powder snow down. Each page contains vivid details: A character standing on a bridge looks out at “that sandwich spread of ocean.” Johnson’s tortured characters may not always get what they want, but all of them have reason to hope.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Rebecca Makkai’ s novels—The Borrower and The Hundred Year House—have established her as one of the most talented literary voices today. Her short fiction has been selected for The Best American Short Stories four years in a row. Now the acclaimed writer returns with Music for Wartime, an anticipated collection of short stories, several of which were inspired by the lives of her paternal grandparents.

Like the librarian in The Borrower whose honesty is tested when young boy hides out in the local library, many of these stories feature ordinary people beset by highly unusual circumstances.  After a university professor accidently kills a rare bird in “Painted Ocean, Painted Ship,” she is plagued by bad luck that puts both her job and her romantic life in jeopardy. A reality show producer manipulates an on-air love affair as her own relationship crumbles in “The November Story.” Other stories have an air of fable about them:  “The Miracle Year of Little Fork” is about a community buffeted by extreme weather after the death of a circus elephant and in “The Singing Women,” a story stunning in its brevity, a composer records the folk songs of two women in a village slated for destruction.

In a 2013 Harpers essay, Makkai wrote thoughtfully about the complex political and creative  legacy left behind by her Hungarian grandparents. These topics and related matters are explored in three re-workings of family anecdotes, as well as “Exposition” and “Suspension,” in which Makkai digs into emotionally loaded issues of memory and heritage. Although these stories pose more questions than they answer, they still carry a powerful charge and hopefully are a promise of more to come.

Music for Wartime has two masterpieces: “The Cross,” about a cellist who returns home from teaching at a summer music camp to find a cross on her lawn marking the spot of an automobile fatality and “The Museum of the Dearly Departed” about the aftermath of a gas leak in a residential building in Chicago. Both stories are quintessential Makkai—witty, intelligent, a little irreverent, but not afraid to venture into emotional territory. 

Steven Millhauser is our patron saint of elsewhere. He is the bard of an Arcadia we long for (but also dread), a sorcerer who can materialize phantoms in our backyards, where they’ve been standing all along, just there, behind the bushes.

Three of the glories in Voices in the Night—Millhauser’s set of magic spells, masquerading as a collection of 16 new short stories—go by the names “Elsewhere,” “Arcadia ” and “Phantoms.” They belong to a fugal set of variations on a theme running through about half the tales, a pattern as variously realized as it is stringently upheld. In this handful of accounts, the storytelling takes the shape of objective reportage. The narrator presents a chronicle of unusual occurrences—or traumatic psychological conditions—going on in a familiar place, a town just like ours, a vicinity we recognize, someplace we gravitate to, as home.

In “Elsewhere,” there are random and terrifying outbreaks of reality’s collapse. The phenomenon starts small—in the dark corners of rooms—but soon evolves into a shift of consciousness, a general unease shared by the entire neighborhood, rising at last into a moment of such transcendent wonder that it ought, by rights, to be apocalyptic. But Millhauser’s genius (it’s not too strong a word) is a determination to keep us firmly in the poetic region that refuses resolution of any kind, especially of the religious kind (which makes a potent cameo in the title story).

“Phantoms” is the best thing the author has ever written. Its journalistic record of ghostly sightings—together with proposed “Explanations” and “Analyses”—never rises above the emotional level of a mezzo piano. It is on account of this restraint that the tale’s impact reaches its heights of spookiness and heartbreak. Who are these phantoms? Why do they withdraw from us, even at the moment of their visitation? There can be no answers.

The remaining stories in the book also work as a set of variations. In each case, Millhauser transforms himself into a sublime “parrot” of a given literary voice—fairy tale, Indian myth, baseball radio announcer, American tall tale, etc. The well-trodden scenario and conventional language of each story become the ironic foundations for its stunning strangeness.

Look to your heart when reading Millhauser! Just like the baseball hit by McCluskey in “Home Run,” you can kiss that baby goodbye.

This radiant collection of short stories features a set of flawed yet sympathetic women in a whole mess of compromising positions.

Nina starts an affair with a man she meets while out running. Josie struggles to extract herself from a sizzling online relationship that fizzles when she meets Billy in real life. Gwen doesn’t lie, exactly, but if her folks want to believe Boris is her boyfriend and not just a roommate, who is she to burst their bubble? And Maya—who appears in several quietly delicious installments—slouches her way toward a mature relationship with some serious detours along the way.

Many of the women in these beautifully wrought stories are single, but they are anything but carefree or mellow. Just as we do in real life, they self-sabotage in ways huge and small, making choices based solely on their heart with no input from their head. First-time author Katherine Heiny takes great care to make her characters relatable even in their imperfections. She paints sweetly resonant moments that also can be very funny:

“For months and months Josie thought about Billy when she should have been wondering what to make for supper—or what to say at Kit’s parent-teacher conference or where Mickey’s lunch card was or if she left the oven on—and now here she is with Billy, and all she can think about is whether she used the last of the onions the night before. (She’s pretty sure she did.)”

Single, Carefree, Mellow is named for a story in which Maya ponders leaving her boyfriend of five years, then decides there is “such a thing as too much loss.” It’s a poignant moment that sums up this smart exploration of love and betrayal, and that fine line between happiness and pain.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, February 2015

Kelly Link tends to inspire a range of comparisons to other authors—usually, some blend of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami—but, in fact, nobody writes stories like hers. Link’s fantastical worlds feel utterly real, partly because they’re intensely matter-of-fact. Her characters are sassy, moody and cool, and they never, ever make any big deal out of the fact that there are monsters, aliens, vampires or ghosts hanging around, or that they might stumble into a pocket universe or some alternate dimension. Mostly they’re concerned with cute guys and flirting and drinks, plus occasionally needing to save the world.

If that sounds light, it’s not meant to. Link, who has written three previous short-story collections and co-edited several anthologies with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, is often hilarious, but her stories still break your heart. The best thing to compare her writing to might be “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” with its perfect combo of dark wit, sex and tragedy. Get in Trouble contains nine stories, which include maybe two happy endings, maybe zero, depending on how you look at them. She’s never been one to wrap things up in tidy fashion.

The tales here range from fairy tales to space opera. Sometimes you’re halfway through before you even know what kind of world you’re in, but that’s OK, because Link guides you so carefully that you’d follow her anywhere. There’s an amateur cyberstalker at a superhero convention who, naturally, gets more than she bargained for (“Secret Identity”). There’s a girl whose job as a caretaker of summer houses is not what it seems (“The Summer People”), a rich far-future playboy who falls for the wrong person (“Valley of the Girls”), a woman driven to distraction by her shadow (“Light”).

As different as these stories are, they all in some way play with expectations. There are surprises on every page. Nothing is what it seems; everything is much more. In short, Kelly Link is magic.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.