Literary Fiction Book Reviews

The Art of Forgetting by Peter Palmieri primarily follows the story of Lloyd Copeland, a charismatic assistant professor spending his days chasing high-class med student flings when he’s not blowing students away in his rare case of successful ‘cool teacher’ lectures.

To outsiders he has everything to look forward to and nothing to regret, but beneath his veneer of success and boyish charms, his “feigned nonchalance” hides a desperate hidden struggle against something that threatens to swallow his life as it has his family generations before him: a struggle against a memory loss and dementia which runs in his family, […]

This ambitious first novel by Jesse Relkin begins with 16-year-old Max arriving in Los Angeles from his hometown of Bend, Oregon to enter an in-patient drug rehabilitation facility. For the few days before he is due to report to rehab, Max stays with his Aunt Mercedes, her children, Erin and Mikey, and their nanny, Shannon. Max is determined to make the most of his few remaining days of freedom by getting in some partying while in LA. It turns out that his aunt, a mortgage broker who may be about to lose her job, her license, and perhaps her own […]

In the opening scene of this wonderful debut novel, a southern gothic that is at times comedic, at times heartbreaking, the protagonist, Simpson Weems, considers murdering his brother. We do not learn what Simpson ultimately decides until the end of the book. After the opening scene, the story becomes an extended flashback. Simpson spends the rest of the book dealing with the past, his own past and that of his family—pasts that are, as William Faulkner wrote and Simpson reminds us, never dead, not even past.

LaFlaur certainly pays his respects to Faulkner, and echoes of Flannery O’Connor can be […]

Geoffrey Young’s novel “Fall” is a tempestuous marriage between beautifully crafted prose and a story that leaps time and place to explain exactly why we find our narrator, Paul, a waiter and would-be writer (there is only one letter difference between them, he tells us hopefully) who sits on a fire escape in New York, penning a desperate soliloquy about his fall in life: how did Paul finish up here and why is he so desperate to end it all?

The reader is drawn in immediately by the gorgeous use of language and the compelling description of feelings. We don’t […]

Literary fiction, like poetry, is a quixotic and lovely thing. It’s never been an easy sell because the genre is an anti-genre. It’s “This doesn’t fit into another category, so we’ll call it literary.” In some cases, perhaps many, it means it’s a tough read. In other cases, it just means it doesn’t have a typical dramatic story structure, but there’s structure and much to love.

Only the Impassioned by H.C. Turk is all these things. It’s often beautiful, it’s impassioned, and it’s tough to follow. The story revolves around twenty-two-year-old Andrew Bower, a draftee in Germany at the end […]

As a child, Michael Accordo longs for a balanced diet. As a young man, he seeks to balance mixed signals from his parents, his religion, and his culture in general.

The novel is structured as though we are reading a transcript of reflective conversations recorded in 1987 between an adult Michael and Ambrosia, a close friend. While Ambrosia is a psychiatric professional, she is not officially his therapist. This softens the story a bit so it doesn’t devolve into self-help pseudo-memoir territory.

Michael begins his reflections in the 1950s with a focus on food as it relates to his family […]