The performing arts are important to Martha Toll’s fiction. It is not only art that carries emotions and ideas—they are infused in the lives of the artists.
“Audition raises profound questions about human relationships. . . . examines how we perform for, communicate with, and read and misread one another. . . .
Terrified horses frozen in Lake Ladoga all winter, until the thaw begins . . . Starved Russian dogs strapped with explosives that detonate when the animals run under German tanks . . .
“Each man had seen plenty of death in his lifetime. Tuberculosis, smallpox, and scarlet fever had done their duty as colors of the herd. Childbirth and cancer had taken plenty too.
At the end of Herman Melville’s novella, “Bartleby the Scrivener” we learn that Bartleby’s “pallid hopelessness” may have been caused by his stint in the Washington, D.C., Dead Letter Office where
Anyone who has read Mavis Gallant’s short stories in The New Yorker or elsewhere will immediately recognize her skill and style as a master storyteller and writer in this final collection
“Schulman exposes the dangers of clinging too hard to stories that don’t serve us, while illustrating both the transcendence and freedom found in discovering the truth.”
France in the year 2027 is ravaged by a series of cyberattacks and deep fakes. With exceptional CGI, a fake video shows a member of the ministerial cabinet executed by guillotine.
In her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, Bruna Dantas Lobato, a translator whose short stories have been widely published in notable publications, tells the story of a young, relatively poor