Five books with small-town settings

Carolyn Kuebler was a co-founder of the literary magazine Rain Taxi and for the past ten years she has been the editor of the New England Review. Her stories and essays have been published in The Common and Colorado Review, among others, and “Wildflower Season,” published in The Massachusetts Review, won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay.

Kuebler’s debut novel is Liquid, Fragile, Perishable.

At Lit Hub she tagged "five books that, with their small-town settings and multiple points of view, could be placed in the tradition of [Sherwood Anderson's] Winesburg, Ohio—and yet, like my own, are nothing like Anderson’s at all." One title on the list:

Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

Though her uncategorizable writing is more often associated with Hans Christian than with Sherwood, Kathryn Davis brings all the elements of small-town fiction to her sixth novel, as she playfully presents the bare facts of the town’s police log, the local gripes and gossip, the sensuality of the weather and the nearby lake, and her characters’ inevitable interconnectedness. It’s a marvelously agile book, graced with an omniscient voice that just as easily moves in close to a young girl preening for a pageant as it does to a pack of dogs out for a delicious morning romp with the neighbors’ chickens.

The book also takes the long view, to the four glaciers that covered this town in a time before people, how beautiful it must have been, and how beautiful it will be after people. And as the title implies, there’s very little dividing one world from the other: the living from the dead, the human from the nonhuman.

Which is not to say that the present-day scenes of the book—in the Crockett Home for the Aged, in kitchens and the school auditorium—or the origin stories and preoccupations of her characters, are just backdrop for the book’s metaphysical leanings. Every moment is invested with meticulous noticing, fascination, even affection.

The small New England town of Varennes provides just the right setting for the author to track the movements of a mother beaver, the bacillus she harbors, the handsome young trapper sent to kill her, the shy girl whose knees weaken at his hazel-eyed glance, and the holy holy holy incantations they all share at the town’s church service.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven books for fans of "The Three-Body Problem"

Neil McRobert is a writer and critic with a Ph.D. in contemporary horror fiction. At Vulture he tagged eleven books for fans of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem. One title on the list:

Jumpnauts, by Hao Jingfang

Hao Jingfang’s 2020 novel, Vagabonds, was rapturously received, marking her out as perhaps the potential inheritor of Liu Cixin’s crown. However, it’s the just-released Jumpnauts that may well consolidate her position. It’s a gorgeous book, treading similar ground to The Three-Body Problem but with a jaunty, almost cheerful outlook. In key ways, it’s a reversal of Cixin’s trilogy. Rather than humanity working together to face alien adversaries, Jumpnauts has its cast of characters navigate a terrestrial geopolitical crisis, while communicating with benevolent visitors from the afar. Jingfang melds scientific futurism with age-old mythology in the most satisfying of ways, suggesting that human history is not at all what we think and holding out the trembling hope, that maybe … just maybe … our future is one of peace.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books set on fictional islands

Elizabeth O'Connor lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the 2020 winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specialising in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes.

O'Connor's new novel is Whale Fall.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight novels that are

set on unnamed or fictional islands; making them not grounded in a specific geography of place, but in the idea of an island. These unnamed islands have a global reach across Europe, Asia, East Africa, and North America, but the islands’ conditions—of isolation, of insularity, of instability—point to similar underlying ideas of disruption, allegory, colonial legacy and environmental care, forming an archipelago of novels mapping their connections to each other.

One title on O'Connor's list:

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto

Taranto’s fictional island off the coast of Connecticut hosts the Rubin Institute, a millionaire-funded university staffed by the “cancellees and deplorables” of traditional academia.

It’s one of a few books on this list that uses an island setting for a fabular, allegorical narrative, the island setting allowing for a contained mini-society that reads heavy with symbolism. The novel is sharp and funny, skewering the notion of modern cancel culture with exile to a phallic building. Its explorations of academic and free speech are suitably messy and ungratifying; as on the mutable ground of the shore, you never know quite where you stand.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the best campus novels ever written

Elise Juska’s new novel, Reunion, was named one of People Magazine’s “Best Books to Read in May 2024.” Her previous novels include The Blessings, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and If We Had Known. Juska’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize from Ploughshares, and her short fiction has been cited by The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

[The Page 69 Test: Reunion; My Book, The Movie: Reunion]

At CrimeReads Juska tagged eight novels "that interrogate the modern college experience or reflect on the past with a knowing eye." One title on the list:

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

The past is not a place that film professor Bodie Kane is keen to revisit, until she accepts a teaching invitation at her alma mater, a New Hampshire boarding school. Back at Granby, teaching a course on podcasting, she confronts not only conflicting versions of her teenage self but the mysterious circumstances around the murder of her roommate, Thalia Keith. This campus novel is both an entertaining whodunit and a no-pulled-punches reckoning with the past.

Read about the other entries on the list.

I Have Some Questions For You is among Nicole Hackett's six top mysteries about motherhood and crime, Brittany Bunzey's ten books that take you inside their characters’ heads, Anne Burt's four top recent titles with social justice themes, and Heather Darwent's nine best campus thrillers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable fictional works featuring sisters

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the new novel We Were the Universe and the short story collection Black Light, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.

At Lit Hub she tagged five favorite fictional works featuring sisters, including:

Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy

The first paragraph of Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is perfectly emblematic of the sticky toxicity sisters can share:

Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you met on a bus. You never knew if it would end with you, euphoric, tanning topless on a fishing boat headed for Ensenada, or coming to in a gas station bathroom, the inside of your eyes feeling as though they’d been scraped out with spoons. Often, it was both.

It’s the “both” that captivates me—the way sisters can be so explosively unpredictable, can so suddenly shift their mood and allegiance. When Debbie disappears after a wild night of eating pills at Salvation, a trashy Los Angeles dance club, Madievsky’s unnamed narrator is pulled into a quest to find her sister and—now that their destructive relationship has somewhat dissolved—to find her own identity as well.

These charismatic sisters come through in gorgeous acoustics (Madievsky is also a poet), exuberant dialogue, and a plot so addictive you’ll try to gulp it down all in one go.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top Alice Munro short stories

Lisa Allardice is the Guardian's chief books writer.

She tagged five of the best Alice Munro short stories, including:

"The Beggar Maid" – New Yorker, 27 June 1977

This was the second Munro story to be published in the New Yorker in 1977, after Royal Beatings a few months earlier. Both are part of a series of stories following the character of Rose, over more than 40 years, and returning always to Hanratty, Munro’s fictional small town in southern Ontario. Rose’s life follows a very similar path to that of the author – from bookish girl growing up on the wrong side of town to scholarship, unwise first marriage, early motherhood, divorce, creative success and a measure of fame, and a return to the small town from which she longed to flee. It is an arc Munro revisited many times over the years. Here, in the fifth “Rose and Flo story”, our heroine has made first escape to University of Western Ontario in London (just like the author). As is the way of things for girls like Rose, she is only trading one trap for another: agreeing to marry privileged but priggish Patrick, who worshipped her and “because it did not seem likely such an offer would come her way again”.

Shame, self-delusion, ambition and regret, our inability to know our own minds – all the Munrovian raw materials are here. “It was a miracle; it was a mistake. It was what she had dreamed of; it was not what she wanted.” The inevitability of their doomed romance is clear from their first visits to their family homes: the plastic table cloth and tube of fluorescent light in the kitchen back at Hanratty; a lime-green plastic napkin holder in the shape of a swan, in contrast to Patrick’s parents’ mansion on Vancouver Island, where “size was noticeable everywhere and particularly thickness. Thickness of towels and rugs and handles of knives and forks, and silences. There was a terrible amount of luxury and unease.” Poor Rose.

Ten years of disastrous marriage ensue – she hits her head against the bedpost, he hits her; she smashes a gravy boat through the dining-room window (it was the decade of smashing gravy boats). “They could not separate until enough damage had been done, until nearly mortal damage had been done to keep them apart.” And, Munro continues in the next sentence, “until Rose could get a job and make her own money, so perhaps there was a very ordinary reason after all.” Munro was always alert to the economics of romance.

A chance encounter in airport late at night many years later results in a childish, ugly gesture, “a timed explosion of disgust and loathing”, which haunts the reader as it does Rose. How could anybody hate her that much, the middle-aged (now moderately famous TV presenter) Rose wonders. “Oh Patrick could, Patrick could.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight coming of age novels about immigrants & first generation Americans

Melissa Mogollon holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from the George Washington University. Originally from Colombia and raised in Florida, she now teaches at a boarding school in Rhode Island, where she lives with her partner and dog.

Oye is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Mogollon tagged eight "incredible books that I hope will inspire the chaotic, weird, unrestrained, and glorious, blossoming 1st-gen immigrant in you." One title on the list:

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Bless All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews because it delivers to us Sneha–a queer Indian woman in her 20s undergoing a self-examination of sorts concerning desire, community, financial security, and familial responsibilities. Sneha is apathetic, horny, and floating through her life-draining yet stability-providing corporate job in Milwaukee as she ponders what she wants vs. what is expected of her. Her tumultuous romance with an older white dancer and sometimes-intentional turn toward chaos make this an absolute necessary read for this list. Plus, the first chapter delivers one of the most iconic ending lines ever: “As the summer began, I move to Milwaukee, a rusted city where I had nobody, parents two oceans away, I lay on the sun-warmed wood floor of my paid-for apartment and decided I would be a slut.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

All This Could Be Different is among Vanessa Lawrence's eight books about young women searching for identity and purpose through work.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four thrillers that explore a mother's worst nightmare

Andromeda Romano-Lax has been a journalist, a travel writer, and a serious amateur cellist. She is the author of The Spanish Bow, The Detour, and Behave, among others.

[The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow; The Page 69 Test: The Detour; Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012)]

Romano-Lax's new novel The Deepest Lake, set in Guatemala, is about a mother’s search for answers about her missing daughter.

At CrimeReads the author tagged four "emotional page-turners that convinced me the missing-child trope is both powerful and capacious, with room for further writerly exploration and interpretation." One title on the list:

Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

In Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared, we arrive at the story of a teen old enough to be a mother herself. Tallulah, 19, has gone on a date, leaving her baby in the care of her mother, Kim. Then Tallulah disappears. Kim has a hard time believing Tallulah would take off without her child, but then again, young adults are unpredictable.

Having thoroughly enjoyed my fill of mother-and-child stories in which the very young victim is unquestionably innocent, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to novels like these precisely because the missing teen or young adult plays a more active and ambiguous role. Our grown or nearly-grown children sneak out, take risks, befriend the wrong people. They fail to answer emails and texts. They try on new identities. They make dangerous mistakes.

On top of that, everything we think we know about our older children relies on the interpretation of spotty memories. How serious was that crisis she had as a freshman in college? What was that argument we had last summer? A certain tone, a look, a silence—these are the clues which only a parent, not a P.I., can decipher.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 25 best time travel books

At the Waterstones blog Mark Skinner tagged twenty-five of the best time travel books. One title on the list:

The Midnight Library
Matt Haig

From the author of How to Stop Time comes this poignant, unique novel about regret, hope and forgiveness - and a library that houses second chances.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Midnight Library is among Mark Skinner's twelve great novels set in a bookshop or library and Clare Mackintosh's top ten books with “What if?” moments.

Also see Holly Smale's five time travel novels that explore what it means to be human and Damian Dibben's top ten time travel books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten novels about resisting productivity culture

Eliza Browning is an intern at Electric Literature.

She tagged ten writers who "use workplace fiction as a lens to examine late-stage capitalism, the gig economy, and the inevitable burnout." One title on the list:

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

36-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura has never felt like she fits in, but when she starts working at the Hiiromachi branch of Smile Mart at the age of 18, she finds a sense of peace and purpose. By copying the social interactions and mannerisms of her coworkers, Keiko attempts to play the part of a “normal person,” until people around her begin to pressure her to get married and start a professional career. Convenience Store Woman is an incisive look at work culture and the pressure to conform in contemporary Japan.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Convenience Store Woman is among Anne Heltzel's seven books about women who refuse to fit in.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles featuring killer women

Julie Mae Cohen is a UK-bestselling author of book club and romantic fiction, including the award-winning novel Together. Her work has been translated into 17 languages. She is vice president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK. Cohen grew up in western Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University, and the University of Reading, where she is now an associate lecturer in creative writing. She lives in Berkshire in the United Kingdom.

Cohen's new novel is Bad Men, her first thriller.

[The Page 69 Test: Bad Men; Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen]

At CrimeReads Cohen tagged six female killer books, including:

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

Everyone in Geeta’s small Indian village believes that she killed her husband. Geeta didn’t kill him, but she doesn’t mind the reputation—it means they leave her alone, and she’s rid of an abusive man. But when other women in the village start approaching her for help getting rid of their own terrible husbands, Geeta’s quiet life is over. But she styles herself after Phoolan Devi, the legendary Bandit Queen, who smashed the caste system and fought against her abusers. A spirited, funny, touching book that, like most of these killer novels, is really about female community.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about video games

Keith Stuart is a UK-based author and journalist; he writes about video games, technology and digital culture.

His books include A Boy Made of Blocks and The Frequency of Us.

Stuart's new novel is Love is a Curse.

At the Guardian he tagged five books from which "avid gamers and utter newcomers alike will learn much about video games and our modern digital world." One title on the list:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

A surprise bestseller following its publication in 2022, Zevin’s beautiful and gripping novel follows a trio of young game designers fulfilling their dreams and falling apart in the process. Although there is plenty of accurate detail about making games, this is really a novel about love, care and inspiration, which just happens to take place in a development studio.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is among Garnett Cohen's seven novels about characters shaped by their cravings.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven self-help books that may change your life

At Vogue Mia Barzilay Freund tagged eleven self-help books that will change your life, including:

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Gilbert takes readers by the hand and guides them toward a more compassionate, cooperative relationship with the creative spirit. Her suggestions range from the practical to the philosophical—exploring everything from dressing up to attract inspiration to understanding creative labor as both playful and serious. Her reflections are wise and reasonable, whimsical without being trite. She shares meaningful insights from her own creative practice and gets candid about pressing ahead in the face of work-halting fear.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine novels about women living alone

Amy Key is a poet and essayist based in London. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe and Isn’t Forever.

Her new book, Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone, was inspired by her viral Granta essay, “A Bleed of Blue.”

At Electric Lit Key tagged nine "novels about women living alone." Her "list—by accident rather than intent—is formed of books where in solitude women contemplate their relationship to other women (in the main), rather than to men." One novel on the list:

Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan

Described by one critic as a kind of “ghosted memoir,” the book unfolds over a sequence of 12 chapters, each formed of several immaculate vignettes, told by Sonia, a horse trainer. It’s the sort of book that could be read all in one go; it has a powerful, propulsive energy. But I found myself reading one or two each night, as I would poems. Each sentence is perfectly calibrated, each left me fizzing with my own desire to create. It was almost too much, too potent! I’m obsessed with this book.

Sonia largely lives alone “in a trailer, a motel room, a stall at the track” and sometimes out of her truck. She describes the kind of living environment I would hate, a bedroom that “looked onto a cow pen” and the possibility of waking up to a goat chewing on my sleeve if I left the door open, but Sonia herself is so pulsing with her electric life, her passion for horses and sharp expressiveness, I felt I wanted to live like her, if not with her.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six novels whose crimes and mysteries grow out of place & manners

Peter Nichols is the author of the bestselling novel The Rocks, the nonfiction bestsellers A Voyage for Madmen, Evolution's Captain, and three other books of fiction, memoir, and non-fiction. His novel Voyage to the North Star was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC literary award. His journalism has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has an MFA degree from Antioch University Los Angeles, and has taught creative writing there and at Georgetown University, Bowdoin College, and New York University in Paris.

Nichols's newest novel is Granite Harbor.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six (plus) "novels whose crimes and mysteries grow out of place and manners," including:

Jane Harper, The Dry

Jane Harper’s novels are set in Australia, beginning with The Dry, three of them featuring her detective Aaron Falk, others are stand-alone mysteries. Usually involving cold cases—not always murders, sometimes deaths resulting from tragic relationships—Harper’s slow-burn but cinematically rendered stories unwrap layers of Australian communities, family secrets, broken friendships that are defined by landscapes both beautiful and harsh.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Dry is among Kate Alice Marshall's five mysteries and thrillers about returning to your hometown, Olivia Kiernan's seven modern classics of small town mystery, Sarah J. Harris's top eight mysteries with images that might stay with you forever and Fiona Barton's eight favorite cold-case mysteries.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen books for fans of "Fallout"

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged fifteen books for fans of the post-apocalyptic TV-drama Fallout, including:

Lessons for Survival: Mothering against "the Apocalypse" by Emily Raboteau

American Book Award-winner, Emily Raboteu (Searching for Zion) knows in today’s climate (both environmental and social) we all need a stark reminder of the fragility of our planet and humanity — especially after enduring the fear of emerging from the vaults to a war-torn landscape alongside Lucy.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about women chasing love abroad

Juli Min is a Korean-American writer based in Shanghai. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson, and she studied Russian and comparative literature at Harvard University.

Her new novel is Shanghailanders.

At Electric Lit Min tagged seven books:

[all are] narratives about women pursuing love in foreign countries (and, in one case, foreign universes). All these novels follow characters experiencing literal and emotional displacement. They are met with the challenge of redefining their relationships, and themselves, on new grounds.

One title on the list:

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

An “Americanah” is a Nigerian who returns to Nigeria after spending time in the U.S. and adopting Americanisms. Ifemelu, the heroine of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s contemporary romantic masterpiece, is one such returnee, who feels neither completely at home while studying abroad in America nor after moving back to Lagos. At every turn, Ifemelu is confronted with her outsider status, in life and in love. But her great romance is with Obinze, her college sweetheart from before leaving Lagos, and who has also lived life on two continents.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Americanah is among Amber Medland's top ten books about long-distance relationships, Lupita Nyong’o’s ten favorite books, Yara Rodrigues Fowler's ten favorite tales told in multiple languages, Greta Gerwig's ten favorite books, and Nada Awar Jarrar's ten favorite books about exile.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that serve as love-letters to American cities

At The Amazon Book Review editor Erin Kodicek tagged five "great reads that also serve as love letters to the US cities in which they take place," including:

Skye Falling by Mia McKenzie

Philadelphia

Skye Falling features a flawed, but lovable, heroine you can’t help but root for—a woman in constant motion, adept at maneuvering around life’s messiness, until one day she makes a discovery that stops her in her tracks. Skye Falling is a hilarious and heartfelt story about coming of age (in midlife!), filled with a cast of characters that McKenzie portrays with obvious affection, including the City of Brotherly Love.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about eating

Sophie Ratcliffe is professor of literature and creative criticism at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Lady Margaret Hall. In addition to her scholarly books, including On Sympathy, she has published commentary pieces and book reviews for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other outlets, and has served a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Wellcome Book Prize.

Ratcliffe's forthcoming book is Loss, A Love Story: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters.

At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books about eating, including:

The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher

Fisher’s pioneering “gastrography” or “foodoir” won plaudits on its 1943 publication. Most famously from one of greatest poets of the 20th century. “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose”, wrote WH Auden. Fisher’s story is about her personal experience of food and the pain of war. She writes richly and variously of food and communion, of “the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream”, of how she “ate bread on a lasting hillside” or “drank red wine in a room now blown to bits”. An extraordinary combination of travelogue and feminism, strawberry jam and oysters, fascists and refugees, love and hunger.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best novels about hauntings

Jen Williams lives in London with her partner and their small ridiculous cat. A fan of pirates and dark folklore from an early age, these days she writes horror-tinged crime thrillers with strong female leads as well as character-driven fantasy novels with plenty of banter and magic. In 2015 she was nominated for Best Newcomer in the British Fantasy Awards.

[My Book, The Movie: Games for Dead Girls]

Williams's new novel is The Hungry Dark.

At CrimeReads she tagged her "five favourite books about Hauntings (which are really books about Bad Places, and Terrible People). One title on the list:

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

Now you could say that I am throwing out my thesis in my second example, because surely Hilary Mantel’s wonderful book about a genuine psychic haunted by the ghosts of her past is not about place at all, but about Alison herself, a woman slowly run ragged by the diabolical men, long dead, who made her childhood a living hell. I would argue that it is still very much about place. In Beyond Black, the very landscape of England feels haunted as Alison flits between pubs and working men’s clubs, plying her trade. Here, you feel, you can’t walk down the road without being accosted by some dreadful little spirit. And the idea of England being thick with spirits and strangeness is present in Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy too. I think Mantel understood the nature of haunting better than any of us.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Beyond Black is among Katya Apekina's eight books about characters with psychic abilities, M. M. DeLuca's five top books that feature mediums & the spirit world, Isaac Fellman's five books that feel like a trippy haunted house, Laura Purcell's ten top books about spirit mediums, Jess Kidd's ten essential supernatural mysteries, and Sarah Porter's five top books with unusual demons and devils.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels about absent mothers

Heidi Reimer is a novelist and writing coach. Her debut novel, The Mother Act, is now out from Penguin Random House. Her writing interrogates the lives of women, usually those bent on breaking free of what they’re given to create what they yearn for. Her front row seat to The Mother Act’s theatrical world began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day.

At Electric Lit Reimer tagged eight "nuanced stories that explore the complicated reasons behind mothers leaving their children." One title on the list:

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

Olga and Prieto haven’t seen their mother, Blanca, in over 25 years, since she abandoned them as young teenagers to fight for a militant political cause. Their only contact is the letters she sends, always knowing what they’re up to, frequently judging their life choices. She’s proud of Prieto’s success as a congressman representing their Latinx Brooklyn neighborhood but disapproves of Olga’s work as the go-to wedding planner of the one percent, work Olga comes to realize she embraced in rebellion to the very values that led Blanca to leave. What different choices might she have made, Olga wonders, had her mother deemed her worthy of time and affection? Blanca is an unfulfilled longing, existing to Olga as “a floating entity,” her only location “inside the many envelopes that arrived from destinations unknown”—until the day she resurfaces in the flesh, asking for help.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue