General

“At barely more than 100 small (four and a half by seven inch) pages in Andrew Bromfield’s excellent English translation The Hall of the Singing Caryatids succeeds both as a novell

“Jeremy Reed is not one of those establishment poets: boring, beige, and bovine. On the contrary, Mr. Reed stands alone, throwing colored glitter in the air.”

Something is not right in Tel Ilan, the fictional Israeli village set in the Manasseh Hills (probably in the general vicinity of Rishon L’Tzion) in which the first seven of the eight stories in

“. . . curiosity, that powerful driver of discovery, is only as valuable as what it turns up.

“Exquisite . . . Aamer Hussein’s messages in The Cloud Messenger will be read over and over again by readers for many years to come.”

“Toward the end of the novel there is a gutsy shift in narrative tone that lends the ending a sense of closure.

“Besides the deftly rendered plot to uncover a conspiracy—which may remind a few readers of another sexually adventurous girl who kicks over a hornet’s nest even if she lacks a dragon tatto

“Whatever Willa Cather was, ‘brilliant writer’ would head the list for most admirers of the literary novel. . . .

“. . . don’t be put off by the magic and sorcery. If you like noir and hard-boiled mysteries, you might want to give Low Town a chance.

“. . . a plot-driven novel conveyed in crisp, descriptive, and thought-provoking prose via an engagingly intelligent third-person narrator. . . . an auspicious debut.”

“No Rest for the Dead . . . not an anthology, but a single story with each author handling a chapter—a literary game of Telephone. . . .

“This family is so real, so understandable, so in need of comfort each in their own way, that we want to embrace them in their grief, applaud their reconciliations, and learn from their lov