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Nadia moves between the competing perspectives of two survivors of the 1990s Balkan Wars who have escaped to London, only to discover that the war has followed them there. Nadia is a young refugee who just wants to forget the past—until Iggy starts temping at her London office. Afraid he may be a sniper from the war she fled, Nadia starts seeing threats everywhere, alongside unsettling visions of her lost girlfriend, Sanja. As her volatile connection with Iggy unravels, Nadia is forced to face the ethically shaky choices she made to escape the war, her survivor guilt, and her disavowed queer sexuality. 

Christine Evans's novel takes us to the recent past of a war that broke apart a European country and that presciently foreshadowed the rise of ethno-nationalism in the West. Tense, suspenseful, and mordantly funny, Nadia tracks the complex ways in which a past marked by political violence can shadow and disrupt the present. 

Comparatively little critical attention has been devoted to narrative technique in modern fiction, and formal analysis of the work of Kafka, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet in particular has for the most part been limited to short studies in journals, many of these in languages other than English. The criticism written in English has dealt primarily with theme with metaphysics and myth and ignored structure and style.

Yet it is structure and style that offer the reader a way into the often bewildering and disturbing fictional worlds these three writers present. The problem confronting writers since the middle of the nineteenth century has been how to cope artistically with an increasingly alienating and mechanized world. As George Szanto sees it, Kafka, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet conclude, by the example of their fictions, that the writer's province is no longer this impossible environment. Instead, the writer must work within the only knowledge available to any one person: the knowledge attained through perceptions. The proper study for a storyteller is thus the search for the unique details, the describable perceptions a person chooses from the outside world and brings into their mind, which in the end define their nature. The shape of the story is determined by the narrating consciousness, that single character through whose awareness the details are filtered. Thus, in a very special sense, the tale and the telling are one.

Szanto's meticulous and thoughtful study of the major fiction of Kafka, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet searches out these details and examines the manner in which each author, through the minds of his characters, has selected and ordered them. His structural approach not only leads the reader directly into the works under scrutiny, but also provides an understanding of the workings of the art itself.

In the appendices, the author surveys the different ways in which criticism has treated these three writers. His extensive bibliography provides a valuable research tool.

The Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize, Winner
At the age of twenty-nine, tired of trying to get along with members of his crew and tired of the money going into somebody else’s pocket, Natch begins working for himself, climbing and cutting down trees in the foothills of north Georgia. He has his truck, ropes, climbing gear, and a rotating selection of secondhand saws he finds at pawn shops and flea markets. He is free to work as he pleases. And he believes he is fine with his life as it is, living alone in an old hunting cabin at the end of a dirt lane, enjoying his habits, exploring his vices, and living, as he puts it, “like some wild thing let loose on the world.”
        Then he meets Asha, an alluring woman who works the nightshift at a convenience store. He finds himself needing her in a way that he has never needed anyone before. Among her charms are her passions for reading and belly dance and her ambition to put herself through school to become a therapist. She believes her studies will cure her of the familial dysfunctions she faced as a child and eventually enable her to help others.
        When Asha discovers that she is expecting a child, the young couple struggles to convert the excitement of their early days together into a more steadfast companionship. Over the seasons of her pregnancy, Asha discovers that the freedom of their hardscrabble existence is overshadowed by the constant threat of misfortune and injury, and she finds herself timorous to bring a child into a setting where chainsaws are everywhere, where constant fires burn the bones of felled trees, a world of endless struggle in which finding more work means finding more danger.




        

Winner, National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association, 2015

Upon the death of their leader, a group of Tuareg, a nomadic Berber community whose traditional homeland is the Sahara Desert, turns to the heir dictated by tribal custom; however, he is a poet reluctant to don the mantle of leadership. Forced by tribal elders to abandon not only his poetry but his love, who is also a poet, he reluctantly serves as leader. Whether by human design or the meddling of the Spirit World, his death inspires his tribe to settle down permanently, abandoning not only nomadism but also the inherited laws of the tribe. The community they found, New Waw, which they name for the mythical paradise of the Tuareg people, is also the setting of Ibrahim al-Koni’s companion novel, The Puppet.

For al-Koni, this Tuareg tale of the tension between nomadism and settled life represents a choice faced by people everywhere, in many walks of life, as a result of globalism. He sees an inevitable interface between myth and contemporary life.

Prize-winning novelist Jay Neugeboren's third collection of short stories focuses on Jews in various states of exile and expatriation—strangers in strange lands, far from home. These dozen tales, by an author whose stories have been selected for more than fifty anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories, span the twentieth century and vividly capture brief moments in the lives of their characters: a rabbi in a small town in New England struggling to tend to his congregation and himself, retirees who live in Florida but dream of Brooklyn, a boy at a summer camp in upstate New York learning about the Holocaust for the first time, Russians living in Massachusetts with the family who helped them immigrate. In "The Other End of the World," an American soldier who has survived life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp grieves for members of his family murdered in a Nazi death camp, and in "Poppa's Books" a young boy learns to share his father's passion for the rare books that represent the Old World. "This Third Life" tells of a divorced woman who travels across Germany searching for new meaning in her life after her children leave home, while both "His Violin" and "The Golden Years" explore the plight of elderly Jews, displaced from New York City to retirement communities in Florida, who struggle with memory, madness, and mortality.

Set in various times and places, these poignant stories are all tales of personal exile that also illuminate that greater diaspora—geographical, emotional, or spiritual—in which many of us, whether Jews or non-Jews, live.

An elderly Korean woman talking about being forced into sexual slavery during World War II. A modern Korean woman extricating herself from a failing relationship with an artist. Award-winning South Korean writer Kim Soom presents us with portraits of two women who couldn’t be more different but who both show resilience and compassion. No Hand Held Mine: Stories, containing one non-fiction piece and one short story, demonstrates the power and breadth of Kim’s writing. “Granny Wild Goose” uses former Comfort Woman Gil Won-Ok’s own words, recorded during conversations with Kim, to tell her life story of brutality, betrayal, and survival. In “The Root’s Tale,” the female protagonist comes to understand the strength of solitary women. Both devastating and reaffirming, No Hand Held Mine shows why Kim Soom has received every major literary award in Korea. Joon-Li Kim and Doo-Sun Ryu’s sensitive translation maintains Kim’s lyricism and exquisite imagery.

This book is published with the support of The Daesan Foundation.
 

An end-of-life sex worker accused of murdering the man she loved—and a town forced to reckon with what makes a life meaningful

Set amid the lush landscapes and winding waterways of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Nobody’s Here is a haunting and compassionate novel about love, loss, and the value of a life. Flossie Taw works as an end-of-life sex worker, providing live-in care and companionship to men in their final days. Her latest client, Leonidas “Leo” Bane, has kept her by his side longer than anyone before him. Against her own rules, Flossie falls in love.

When Leo is found dead from what may or may not have been a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Flossie becomes the subject of suspicion in her small Maryland town. As she struggles with an unfamiliar grief, she becomes the subject of intense local speculation as neighbors, friends, police officers, the county coroner, and countless others weigh in on her character, her profession, and her possible role in Leo’s death.

Told through a rich chorus of voices alongside Flossie’s own, Nobody’s Here explores how ordinary people wrestle with life’s biggest questions while navigating the demands of everyday life. As the residents of Canterbury, Maryland, debate Flossie’s culpability, they are also forced to consider what makes a life meaningful and what we owe one another at the end of it. Nobody’s Here asks readers to look beyond appearances and decide for themselves whether Flossie Taw is responsible for Leo’s death, or whether she was responsible for giving his life meaning.