31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 9: “The Cloak” by Robert Bloch
Not a retread or homage, Bloch’s vampire story displays a momentum and technique typical of the author’s best work.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 8: “Toward Happy Civilization” by Samanta Schweblin; Megan McDowell, trans.
Samanta Schweblin’s story about paralysis and paranoia shares elements in common with Beckett and Kafka.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 6: “Still Life No. 41” by Teresa Solana; Peter Bush, trans.
Catalan writer Soldana offers an outrageous premise for a story that serves as an acerbic satire of entitlement and power.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 5: “Renaissance Man” by Maxim Osipov; Boris Dralyuk, trans.
A Moscow oligarch becomes involved with a redheaded soprano and an eleven-year-old boy in a tragedy from the contemporary Russian realist.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 3: “Boys Go to Jupiter” by Danielle Evans
Evans’s story deals with the fallout from a viral photo of a white woman in a Confederate flag bikini.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 1: “Helping” by Robert Stone
In this ironically titled story, the author examines subjects of addiction, masculine violence, and PTSD without ever resorting to easy didacticism.
“I try to avoid labels”: Jeff VanderMeer on his new novel, ecological disaster, and why he won’t run for public office
Nominally a hardboiled noir, Hummingbird Salamander is also a cri de coeur about our current ecological crisis.
What’s in a name? Alexandra Andrews’s debut investigates literary fame and duplicity
Who Is Maud Dixon? is about ambition, identity, and the malleable nature of personality.
The anxiety of influencers: Ellery Lloyd’s Instagram mommy thriller People Like Her
The twisty, fast-paced debut effectively skewers online culture while telling a tense story about a family threatened from within and without.
Debut novelist Rebecca Watson reckons with how form can be used to reflect the realities of contemporary society
little scratch acts as a kind of bridge between Modernism and our current culture of distraction.