By Pallas M. Gutierrez The Tilting House by Ivonne Lamazares follows Yuri, a Cuban teenager during the country’s Special Period, as she navigates the return of her formerly unknown sister and her escape to New York City. Mariela, Yuri’s sister, returns from la Yuma (the United States) in 1993 to uplift the Cuban people and her own artistic practice. Mariela…

By Tommy Ebrahimi Ian Frazier is obsessed with details and with the specific: the color of an old friend’s kitchen (daffodil yellow), the length of the world’s largest beaver dam (2,790 feet), the inscription on an armored car from the Russian Revolution (“Enemy of Capital”). This particularity suffuses everything Frazier writes. In The Snakes That Ate Florida—a compilation of selected…

Reviewed by Shannon Glass In her latest novel, Mercy, Joan Silber gives a multigenerational perspective on the ripples that radiate from one person’s gravest regret. In distinct, hauntingly clear internal monologues, Silber illustrates the many ways that people can show mercy to others and, most importantly, themselves. Each character’s romantic, platonic, and familial relationships take center stage in complicated ways…

Reviewed by Sydney Abraham Lorena Hughes’s historical novel The Night We Became Strangers covers many themes, including grief, remorse, romance, and pursuit. The book is a fictionalized account of the catastrophic 1949 Ecuador adaptation of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, during which listeners were never informed that the broadcast of Martians invading the Earth was fiction and thus…