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Benzonia, Michigan, 1894: a sleepy Congregationalist community, dedicated to the education of hardworking and virtuous young people of both sexes and all races. Anna Spencer Thacker is the daughter of missionaries, a faithful wife, and mother of five, pious to a fault. She is suddenly stricken with a mysterious ailment that soon proves fatal. Was it truly an unfortunate illness? Or was it murder—or suicide?

Taking a true story of a murder in her own family, Becky Thacker has crafted a historical mystery novel whose cast of characters rapidly builds, including William Henry Thacker as deputy sheriff, deacon in his church, a kind man . . . but perhaps just a trifle too fond of the attractive young housekeeper; and Charlotte Spencer, the pretty missionary sister, almost saintly in her efforts to bring Jesus to the Armenians in the mountains of Turkey, though a bit prone to exaggeration. She could be a suspect—or the next target.

The children are Roy, 19: musical, a good student, but a little too wild for Benzonia; Ralph, 17: trying to shoulder the responsibilities of farm and family; and Lottie, 14: a talented young artist trying to take care of young Will and Josie. Faithful Unto Death provides a window into the daily lives of small-town Michiganders at the turn of the century wrapped up in a riveting whodunit.

Cover image by Hemera/Thinkstock

The silent rage that seizes a matriarch whose family is feting her eighty-ninth year.The tangle of emotions felt by a sophisticated young woman toward her elderly mother. An adolescent girl's obsessive fear of being looked at. The "giddying sense of compassion" that a blind man introduces into a young housewife's settled existence. Of such is made the world of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer whose finest work is acknowledged to be her exquisitely crafted short stories. Here, in these thirteen of Lispector's most brilliantly conceived stories, mysterious and unexpected moments of crisis propel characters to self-discovery or keenly felt intuitions about the human condition. Her characters mirror states of mind. Alienated by their unsettling sense of life's absurdity, they seem at times absorbed in their interior lives and in the passions that dominate and usually defeat them.

Giovanni Pontiero's translation has been lauded by Gregory Rabassa as "magnificent."

Growing up in 1990s Russia in a family marked by poverty, substance abuse, and neglect, Kola and his sister are eventually admitted into the orphanage system. Here, Kola comes face to face with a different but equally daunting challenge: navigating an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile world haunted by the absence of his mother. The ensuing journey, which eventually culminates in the adoption by an Italian family, alternates moments of both trauma and deliverance, while asking fundamental questions about our ability to reconcile ourselves with unfathomable loss.
 
Harrowing yet lyrical, Nikolai Prestia’s prize-winning 2021 novel is a testament to the duality of memory in its ability to both hurt and heal, and to the transformative power of those figures, adults and peers alike, who contribute to a child’s development. Translated into English as part of a collaboration between the author and a mother-daughter translator duo, the novel serves up a wrenching glimpse into the back stories that often precede the adoption of an older child. 

In Sari Rosenblatt’s collection, by turns tender and hilarious, we see fathers who are bullies and nervous watchdogs, haunted by their own pasts and fear of the future they may never see. And who do their daughters become? A substitute teacher who encounters mouthy students who believe she’s not real. Another lands a job on her city’s arson squad, researching derelict properties their owners might want to burn. A beleaguered mother, humiliated by the PTA’s queen bee, finds solace in an ancient piece of caramel candy. “I keep sucking,” she says, “until some flavor, no longer caramel, comes out.” In the end, this is what all these finely wrought characters want: to wring sweetness from what’s been passed down to them.

Rosenblatt’s comic sensibility, so present in these stories, entertains and consoles, while seeming to say to her readers: you might as well laugh.

A poignant coming-of-age novel inspired by martial arts films and family lore about powerful ghost brides

Fatty Wong is a streetwise eleven-year-old in 1960s colonial Hong Kong who dreams of ruling the world. She fights daily for a better life, but in an era of great political turmoil, Fatty faces struggles in the streets of her working-class village—and inside her own home. As the city’s youth begins protesting British rule and local communists mimic the Cultural Revolution that has ignited chaos across mainland China, Fatty grapples with her own desire for freedom and spars with the neighborhood kids to discover her strength through kung fu. She takes a job at a convenience store to carve a space of her own, only to be sexually abused by the owner. Increasingly attuned to the spirit world, Fatty is visited by a neighbor boy who was shot and killed during a riot; his ghost offers to help her escape her anguish if she cares for his grieving mother. Now Fatty must embark on an adventure that will demand she discover her true identity—and raise a fist to anyone attempting to stifle her spirit.

Short stories by a celebrated playwright bare the horrors of the Syrian civil war.

A selection of stories by Syrian author and playwright Mustafa Taj Aldeen Almosa about characters enduring the horrors of the Syrian civil war. With exquisite wit and lightness of touch, Almosa portrays the internal world of characters facing great physical violence or psychological pressures. Using both realism and fantastic elements, Almosa weaves short stories that are strange, violent, and delicate at the same time. This collection is an invaluable attempt to denounce war, to exist, to love life in all its manifestations and to learn how to cope with loss and disappointment. It is a cry against fear and death as much as it is an ode and a homage to life and love in times of both war and peace.

Felix Faure Street opens with a gruesome scene, with two incompetent police officers standing before a bloody and dismembered body found strewn across the sidewalk in a working-class neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal. At the onset of the investigation, the body of the murdered man begins to tell the story of the events leading up to his death, but no one is listening to him. Life on Felix Faure Street goes on, just as it does every day. As the mystery unfolds, community members get involved in the investigation. Guided by supernatural elements that manifest in the form of four elusive veiled figures, they will come face to face with a brutal truth about the horrifically mutilated man and those he has abused.

A fresh look at the relationship between theology and rhetoric.

Focusing on the Incarnation-the only dogma original to Christianity, in which God becomes man and history-this book offers a wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated investigation of the relationship between Christian discourse and literature from Roman antiquity to the fourteenth century through a look at texts by Cicero, Quintilian, Martianus Capella, Tertullian, Saint Augustine, Alain of Lille, Guillaume de Machaut, and others.

In this highly individual study, Avrom Fleishman explores a wide range of literary references to human culture—the culture of ideas, facts, and images. Each critical essay in Fiction and the Ways of Knowing takes up for sustained analysis a major British novel of the nineteenth or the twentieth century. The novels are analyzed in the light of social, historical, philosophical, and other perspectives that can be grouped under the human sciences.

The diversity of critical contexts in these thirteen essays is organized by Avrom Fleishman's governing belief in the interrelations of literature and other ways of interpreting the world. The underlying assumptions of this approach—as explained in his introductory essay—are that fiction is capable of encompassing even the most recondite facts and recalcitrant ideas; that fiction, though never a mirror of reality, is linked to realities and takes part in the real; and that a critical reading may be informed by scientific knowledge without reducing the literary work to a schematic formula.

Fleishman investigates the matters of fact and belief that make up the designated meanings, the intellectual contexts, and the speculative parallels in three types of novel. Some of the novels discussed make it clear that their authors are informed on matters beyond the nonspecialist's range; these essays help bridge this information gap. Other fictional works are only to be grasped in an awareness of the cultural lore tacitly distributed in their own time; a modern reader must make the effort to fathom their anachronisms. And other novels can be found to open passageways that their authors can only have glimpsed intuitively; these must be pursued with great caution but equal diligence.

The novels discussed include Little Dorrit, The Way We Live Now, Daniel Deronda, he Return of the Native, and The Magus. Also examined are Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Northanger Abbey, To the Lighthouse, Under Western Eyes, Ulysses, and A Passage to India.