Essay by Claire Lobenfeld • Alexandra Kleeman’s latest novel Something New Under the Sun is a book about plague. Not necessarily about sickness—although there is an age-agnostic form of dementia in its pages—but the Biblical kind. A novelist moves…
There is a town at the edge of things where women hold in their screams. They die young: high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, cancer. The girls watch their mothers and grandmothers and aunts play Ring Around the Rosie,…
This shape, he said to his niece as he tossed her the ball on the grass. This roundness, this perfection of throwing and catching, this can be the thing for a good long while. He did not tell her…
Nobody at the Powers That Be figured out the source. But something happened. And below, the town experienced a tired day. Everyone woke. Carol showered. Alfred ate breakfast. Sandra contemplated suicide. Others kissed spouses or parents or pets or…
Be God. Step way back for a second. Imagine this folded earth as bed sheets dropped in heaps onto the floor. Now stick a steep winter light off to the east. Call this a landscape. Tall shadows form across the…
In The Gypsy Moth Summer, Julia Fierro uses six different narrators to tell us the story of the inhabitants of a small island in New York during the summer of 1992. The novel is broken into five parts, with a…
