“Life itself has very little plot,” says one of the narrators of these magnificent short stories by Lavin (Tales of Bective Bridge), who died in 1996. Rather than run a conventional course toward epiphany or redemption, each entry ends abruptly or ambiguously. In “A Cup of Tea,” a stubborn college student and her equally stubborn mother clash during a visit home. The story culminates in an all-too-realistic moment of folly as the daughter comes close to understanding her mother but instead lurches into an over-intellectualization of the issue at hand. In “A Memory,” a retired professor collapses in a fit of delirium after refusing to commit romantically to a former colleague he has been stringing along. A young man and an aging widow begin to fall in love in “The Cuckoo Spit” but go their separate ways after only a few days of courtship, unable to surmount their own ageism and anxieties about propriety. Many of the well-crafted tales feel ahead of their time. This acute and uncompromising collection is a gift. Agent: Grainne Fox, UTA. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this towering absurdist work that is perhaps easier to admire than enjoy, Moresco (Clandestinity) chronicles a young man’s successive affirmations of his religious, political, and artistic lives. Divided into three sections covering each phase, the novel opens as the unnamed narrator, a seminary student waking up in a dark dormitory, painstakingly and slowly polishes his shoes. He calls this exercise one of his “games of eternity.” At the seminary, he meets a roguish older prefect named The Cat, who reappears in the third section as a Godot-like book publisher who endlessly defers meeting with the narrator to discuss his manuscript (presumably a novelization of his days as a seminarian and political operative). In the second section, the narrator joins a shadowy left-wing organization and tours Italy in a “plastic car” with a blind man, delivering political speeches to near-empty or deserted town squares. The narrator withholds emotional, spiritual, romantic, and intellectual reflections, and instead recounts his life like an impersonal and uncanny film reel. Moresco punctuates the narrative with hallucinatory set pieces, most memorably the nighttime incineration of a trash heap on the narrator’s family estate, complete with a raucous crowd and brandy-drunk animals running wild. It’s a bit exhausting, but there are plenty of marvels to be found. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Argentine novelist Piñeiro (Elena Knows) explores the effects of Catholic dogma on a family in this explosive story of a murder and its aftermath. Thirty years after the body of Ana Sarda was found dismembered and burnt in an empty lot, her sister Lia is visited by their younger sister Carmen and Carmen’s husband, Julián, whom Lia hasn’t talked to since Ana’s death. Carmen and Julián’s son, Mateo, has gone missing, and the couple learned he visited a bookstore in Santiago de Compostela, where Lia works. The narrative shifts among the characters’ perspectives as they reveal lifelong secrets, piece together clues about what happened to Ana, and reflect on the ways their lives and family relationships have been warped by the church they were raised in. (Mateo, describing his parents’ reaction to his crisis of faith, notes that they “tr[ied] to banish those doubts, sending me to psychologists—Catholic ones, of course—as if my doubts were obscene or signalled a psychotic break”). As the story unfolds, Piñeiro beautifully blends mystery and true crime tropes with incisive insights into the church’s sexual repression and subjugation of women. It’s an illuminating page-turner. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Wang debuts with the spectacular and wrenching story of a woman contending with her mother’s plastic surgery addiction. Linli Feng, a nonprofit worker who assists incarcerated women, reluctantly visits her mother, Fanny, in Los Angeles after a three-year estrangement. Fanny’s latest botched procedure, after a lifetime of risky facial alterations, has become infected and she desperately needs help. Though Linli only anticipates a short stay, Fanny’s fanatical surgeries, skin bleaching, and black-market Botox injections place Linli on high alert. Tricked and guilted into putting her own life on hold, she extends her visit to ensure her mother’s well-being. But things soon spiral out of control when federal agents entangle Fanny in an investigation involving illegal cosmetic treatments, and she then becomes a contestant on America’s Beauty Extreme, an outrageous new reality TV series that pits plastic surgery addicts against one another. Wang raises the tension to remarkable heights as Linli is torn between protecting her mother and maintaining the boundaries she needs to keep her sanity intact. Along the way, Wang takes candid stock of Fanny’s plastic surgery disasters (her purple, post-rhinoplasty nose “twisted inward as if it were trying to smell itself”) and the pressures of generational trauma. This bracing tale goes much more than skin deep. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

A young queer woman harnesses her ability to see dead people during the AIDS epidemic in Adler’s powerhouse debut. Set in mid-1980s New York City, the story follows Renata, a lesbian retail worker who has watched her friends suffer and die from the mysterious and ruthless illness. She’s just lost her best friend and longtime roommate, Mark, at 29, and refuses to rest until she “sees” him again. But it’s been three months and Mark still hasn’t materialized, as so many other ghosts have, including Francois, a friend of Mark’s who appears on Renata’s fire escape screaming in pain, and Mrs. Velez, a neighbor who died in the apartment below hers. Emotionally drained from the ghosts’ appearances, Renata turns to a Ghostbusters-type group called Manhattan Remediation that uses “evidence-based” electromagnetic field technology to “sanitize” Manhattan from the restless spirits haunting the living. It turns out the group has nefarious political motivations in line with the Reagan administration’s cruel denial of the existence of AIDS. Renata, her girlfriend Claude, and their friends set out to stop Manhattan Remediation, hoping to protect the legacy of AIDS victims from being vanquished in the name of misguided moral purity. Adler’s intimate portrayal of the period is richly detailed, both in the grim atmosphere and the city’s life-affirming downtown arts community. This dazzles like a mirror ball. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

The descendants of Arctic homesteaders cope with climate change and discover a strange new livelihood in Shaw’s inventive debut. In an alternate present, the Spahr family lives in a “salmon-colored fisherman’s shack built on deep stilts” in the middle of a fjord, accessible only by boat or floatplane. The mother, Viola, supports the family as a charter pilot, raising three children with her farmer husband, Fry. Viola dies just as visitors begin arriving to hunt for pianos brought to the fjord by early settlers, which are now underwater, and are worth a great deal of money. Her daughter, Milda, who has long dreamed of moving south for school, becomes wrapped up in the piano hunting, and teams up with her brother Finley, a committed piano hunter who dives with the aid of a submersible that resembles a jet ski, to locate a piano brought there by their ancestor Moose Bloomer. The search is complicated by rising sea levels, and by the siblings’ uneasy relationship with the Huntmoon family, pastors of a local church. Shaw weaves memorable folkloric elements such as pet sea lions and a piano that is 18 feet tall with a resonant story of a people contending with a vanishing way of life. It’s a singular tale of human perseverance. Agent: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Frost (Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier) delivers an immersive if underwhelming novel of President Franklin Roosevelt as seen through the eyes of one of the lesser-known members of his staff. In 1934, journalist Bill Hassett, a friend of the president, is invited to the Oval Office, and they begin a long-running working relationship, with Hassett serving as speechwriter and confidant. From the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 through early 1945, Hassett watches as Roosevelt makes war plans with his closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, going back and forth between these two imposing men to organize a military alliance against Germany and Japan. The author also brings into focus lesser-known figures like Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna, who helps Hassett deal with her father’s secret health problems; and Lucy Mercer, whose on-again, off-again romance with FDR continues until his death. Based on Hassett’s diaries, the novel takes readers inside FDR’s inner circle, but there is nothing revelatory or especially dramatic in the depiction of these well-known events. It’s a curious project, one that evokes FDR’s sphinxlike quality without going much deeper. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

This marvelous collection from Argentinian surrealist Aira (Fulgentius) begins with a departure, in the form of a grounded and revelatory personal history. “Margarita (A Memory)” recounts the author’s childhood in rural Pringles, where most of his work is set, and his encounter with the bewitching Margarita, a distant relative whose “mythical and obscure” family history unlocked his ability to turn his dreams and fantasies into art (“I was discovering that it was possible to enter the picture and explore it from within, bathing in the rain of particles that fertilized the world”). The other four entries return to the bizarre terrain of Aira’s fiction. “The Dream” comprises two capers: a bank robbery committed by a teller and a search for a missing woman, the latter of which leads to a convent that houses a secretive cult of robotic nuns. “The Hormone Pill” begins comically, when a middle-aged husband takes one of his wife’s menopause pills as a prank. From there, the story zooms out to become a meditation on existence and the “joke-point at the center of the general system of life.” “Musical Brushstrokes” centers on a painter who flees Pringles only to find himself in a wilderness surrounded by feral hobos, a murderous dwarf, and the kind of revolutionary violence from which he’d hope to find sanctuary. The delightful picaresque “Princess Springtime” takes place on an island paradise where a princess in a tower translates hack novels until her idyll is shattered by the arrival of a fiendish pirate. Aira’s profound ability to capture the vividness and twisted logic of dreams remains undiminished. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Besson (Lie with Me) offers a haunting and wistful work of autofiction about a fateful summer. “I have never managed to rid myself of that story. It has never left me,” Philippe narrates on the first page, before jumping back to 1985 when he was 18 years old and spending the summer with family friends on an island off the northern coast of France. He shares a room with his hosts’ son, François, whom he’s grown up with, and looks forward to lazy, carefree days. He quickly befriends Nicolas, who recently moved to the area, as well as Alice and Marc, Parisians visiting for the summer. A messy tangle of friendship and romance ensues, with Philippe intrigued platonically by Nicolas while Alice desires Philippe, much to the despair of François, who wants Alice. Meanwhile, Marc and Philippe dance around their unspoken mutual attraction before going on a date. After a night of drinking at nightclubs, Nicolas goes missing, and Philippe is flooded with guilt over not making sure Nicolas found his way home after they were separated. Reflecting back on the incident and gradually shading in the details, he reflects on how the event marked his “loss of innocence.” Besson eloquently portrays the characters’ youthful fickleness and yearning. This one leaves a mark. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Haig offers a touching companion piece to his 2020 novel The Midnight Library, this time following an 81-year-old bookstore chain owner who finds a second chance in the afterlife. Wilbur Budd has devoted himself to his business for decades, which caused him to neglect his wife, Maggie, and lose her many years earlier. She surprises him with a phone call, in which she expresses a desire to become friends again. Shortly after, he collapses and dies. In the afterlife, he finds himself at a train station and realizes he’s the same age as when he and Maggie honeymooned in Venice. The train that arrives is the full-size version of a toy train he had as a child. Aboard it is Agnes Bagdale, who owned the bookstore Wilbur frequented as a young boy. Agnes then leads him on a tour of his past, stressing that he must not try to speak to his younger self. However, he breaks the rule when the train brings him to his honeymoon. Haig occasionally slips into platitudes (“It only takes a moment to die, but a whole lifetime to learn how to live”), but he authentically evokes Wilbur’s fears and regrets over the course of a life marked by sacrifice. This will please the author’s fans. Agent: Clare Conville, C&W Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink