Ian MacAllen

Alaska is a place of extremes: geography, isolation, weather—even daylight. These extremes sit at the center of Leigh Newman’s new story collection Nobody Gets Out Alive, as the collection probes the limitations and impact of the unique environment. Alaska serves as a common thread linking the narratives and defines the collection.
Newman’s 2013 memoir Still Points North followed her childhood experiences growing up in the wilds of the state. Nobody Gets Out Alive contains both stories explor...

A cottage industry of likability discourse manifests with regularity, and Jerks, Sara Lippmann’s new collection of stories, will no doubt inspire a certain level of curiosity with the subject. The characters are not nice, they are not kind, they are not good people; they are, as the title suggests, jerks. That isn’t to say this is a collection featuring exclusively unpleasant characters, but throughout the book there is a persistent theme of unpleasantness.
In 2013, Claire Messud, in discussi...

On a warm, sunny September afternoon years ago, I was learning to shoot film on a vintage 35mm Minolta camera. I stumbled across New York City’s San Gennaro festival. The bright colors and motley foods provided a spectacular palette for experimenting. San Gennaro titillates a full spectrum of senses, but none more than taste, a triumph of gastronomic excess. It is the culmination of the abbondanza, the great abundance, a concept celebrated by Italians arriving in America to describe the bount...

Stephanie Kupchynsky’s 1991 disappearance from her home in Greece, New York haunted the people of her home town of East Brunswick, New Jersey, a bedroom community about an hour south of Brooklyn. Kupchynsky’s father, Jerry, taught music at the local school. He was beloved by his students, like Rachel Rear, who played the clarinet. Rachel’s mother eventually married Jerry, and she became his stepdaughter and Stephanie’s stepsister. During that time, Stephanie’s disappearance remained unsolved....

We’re living through rough times. Pandemics, climate change, volcanic eruptions—each sweeping horror seems worse than the last. In Kim Fu’s new collection of stories, Lesser Known Monsters Of The 21st Century, the horrors are more intimate, smaller, and less global in scale. This is not a collection filled with fantastic beasts, although a sea monster does make an appearance, but instead illuminates the monstrous nature of humanity.
Fu is the author of two previous novels and a collection of ...

The day my son was born, I was two weeks out of my second dose of Pfizer. My wife and I received boosters in the early fall. We kept our faces masked. Then Omicron arrived in our Brooklyn neighborhood.

EASTHAM — The redevelopment of Town Center Plaza offers an exciting opportunity to create a new destination and a more pedestrian-friendly community, but pedestrian access to Eastham’s commercial district needs improvement now, not later.
The disconnected strip malls along Eastham’s Route 6 business corridor create serious dangers for pedestrians and cyclists, who often dash across four lanes of traffic. For some, the result is tragic — like the man from upstate New York who died in 2015. Rou...

Lisa Harding’s second novel, Bright Burning Things, follows single mother Sonya Moriarity, as she slides in the abyss of alcohol abuse, enters a recovery program, and attempts to rebuild her life. The emotional center of the novel is Sonya’s love for her son, Tommy, and her internal struggle to be the mother he needs.
The early chapters play out as short vignettes, snapshots strung together in staccato bursts of narrative. The effect replicates Sonya’s drunkenness and the passing moments of s...

Anthony Bourdain was a much beloved storyteller who happened to cook, and tell his stories through food. His career began in kitchens, but his breakout success came with the publication of his memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. The book’s success inspired imitators and launched his career as a television presenter. Perhaps his greatest talent was in his ability to relate to people, both the subjects of his interviews and the viewers watching from home. It was...

Henry David Thoreau observed that men often lead lives of quiet desperation, and although he omits women, they often also lead lives of quiet desperation, as is the case for the women under examination in Genevieve Plunkett’s debut story collection, Prepare Her. In this collection, the domestic lives of female protagonists come under scrutiny, mainly from themselves. The collection is set in rural New England, where a slow pace of life allows the characters the time and space to ponder their ...

Men and women often have an unequal share of power in their relationships. In the debut story collection, Objects of Desire, Clare Sestanovich explores the relationships men and women share, and examines the power dynamics between them. The men primarily escape without consequence while the women bear the emotional and literal burdens the characters confront in these stories.
From the very onset of the collection, the women struggle to find agency in their lives. In “Annunciation,” we meet Ir...

Science fiction dystopias have often featured authoritarian governments, yet increasingly in the real world, the nation-state is ceding power to privately held corporations. Hypercapitalism threatens individual liberty in Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak, where two megacorporations have all but replaced the American government and control essential natural resources.
Mal and her best friend Jessa live in the slums outside New Liberty City, a super megapolis constructed to accommodate climate ...

Science fiction dystopias are often deployed as a means of examining politics, ideology, or technology, but for Izumi Suzuki, the medium serves an intimate exploration of anxiety, pain, and sadness. The translated stories collected in Terminal Boredom depend on science fiction dystopias, but focus on characters who are broken and seeking their own personal redemption, rather than the expected grand narratives about society as a whole. Even though sometimes they are “out of this world” aliens ...

Sarahland, the debut story collection from Sam Cohen, links disparate stories through a unique framework: each story features a character named Sarah. This architecture allows Cohen to explore a variety of topics from heartbreak to youthful self-discovery. The stories stand alone, but by linking them with Sarahs, the collection manifests something more complex. There are other unifying elements as well, like queer and gender non-conforming protagonists, and anti-establishment, anti-conformity...