Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
This month, contributors KATHARINE HALLS, THEA MATTHEWS, and OLGA ZILBERBOURG take your reading lists to Prague, Damascus, and New York City with four poetry and fiction recommendations that are wholly absorbing, in their stories and settings alike.
Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, trans. Paul Wilson; recommended by TC Online Contributor Olga Zilberbourg 
Reviewed by SAM SPRATFORD
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
As we’re finding our footing in 2025 and, in the U.S., shoring up against new political realities, January has been pervaded by a sense of uncertainty. The books our community is reading right now seem to respond to this feeling, in areas of life spanning from assimilation to cooking anxiety. Read on for recommendations from our contributors AFTON MONTGOMERY, HEMA PADHU, and ADRIENNE SU that just might help to stabilize your spirits—or, at the very least, provide some quality distraction.
Miriam Ungerer’s Good Cheap Food and Margaret Eby’s You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible; recommended by Issue 28 Poet Adrienne Su
When working on my last book of poems, Peach State (2021), I often wrote my way to the kitchen: writing about a dish made me want to cook it. These days, I’m cooking my way to the proverbial typewriter. I read about food. Then I cook something I’ve read about, and the process nudges me to fill a page.
By HOLLY WILSON
Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG
Molly is a badass. Obvious, isn’t it, from the novel’s title? Kittentits. That’s her, Molly. She’s a motherless white ten-year-old kid, living in Calumet City, Michigan. It’s 1992, and she’s obsessed with attending the Chicago World’s Fair, about to open downtown.
Before she gets there, Molly comes to idolize a woman who tried to kill her conjoined twin; runs away from home to Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville; meets an elderly polio patient living inside an iron lung who gives séances; and befriends an African-American ghost boy and artist, Demarcus. Together, Molly and Demarcus hatch a plan of necromancy to commune with the ghosts of their dead mothers. They camp out at the Fair for weeks, waiting for New Year’s Eve to perform the ritual.
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
If you’re in need of a deep breath amid the holiday frenzy, look no further. This month, Issue 28 poets and longtime TC contributors OLENA JENNINGS and ELIZABETH HAZEN bring you three recommendations that force you to slow down and observe. Hazen’s picks provide an intimate window into the paradoxical, tragic, and sometimes ridiculous characters that inhabit our world, while Jennings’ holds up a mirror to readers, asking them to meditate on the act of viewing itself.
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Chantal V. Johnson’s Post-Traumatic and Kate Greathead’s The Book of George; recommended by Issue 28 Contributor Elizabeth Hazen
Typically, I have a few books going at once, and I am almost always at the very least reading one physical book and listening to another. Often, the pairings reveal interesting connections, and my most recent reads—Kate Greathead’s latest, The Book of George, and Chantal V. Johnson’s debut, Post-Traumatic—did not disappoint.
Both books are contemporary, the former out just this October, the latter in 2022, and feature protagonists who are deeply flawed but trying to figure out who they are. They hail from starkly different backgrounds, though, and this determines the starkly different difficulties they encounter as they navigate adulthood.
By JOSEPH BATHANTI
Reviewed by STEPHEN HUNDLEY
Omega Street. Malocchio. Napolitano and Calabrese. Fritz, Frederico, and Fred. In The Act of Contrition, a collection of linked stories and one novella, Joseph Bathanti reconstructs the mid-twentieth century in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The Act of Contrition arrives on the heels of Bathanti’s 2022 book of poetry, Light at the Seam, and revisits characters introduced in the author’s 2007 story collection, The High Heart. Bathanti represents East Liberty as a kaleidoscopic dome of terms, places, and names that become familiar to readers, transporting—even trapping—them in a world that is sharp, hostile, and yet, manages to feel like home. Even as readers feel themselves fixed under the pressures of place, they cannot help but be, in equal parts, enchanted by the specificity of Bathanti’s prose. For example, take these lines, from “The Malocchio,” which wed the romance of embodied perspective to the frank realism of the quotidian archive:
“…nothing but brick piles and twisted metal peeked above the mud lots hacked with maudlin footprints and toppled clotheslines—trampled dresses and diapers yet clinging to them. Jackhammers still throttled. The stench of gasoline cloaked the ether—and in the distance, from Penn Avenue, rose the heavenly aroma of Nabisco’s ovens.”
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
This month, our online contributors CHRIS JOHN POOLE, JULES FITZ GERALD, and LAURA NAGLE recommend three inventive, deeply human books with stories that traverse two oceans—from Japan, to Mexico, to Norway.
Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami (trans. Sophie Hughes); recommended by TC Online Contributor Chris John Poole
In her author’s note to This Is Not Miami, Fernanda Melchor writes that “to live in a city is to live among stories.” The city in question is Veracruz, Melchor’s birthplace, a city of cartel violence and political corruption; ritual magic and cold, hard truth. Veracruz’s stories, meanwhile, are those which are gleaned from—and imposed onto—its grim realities.
The stories in This Is Not Miami are crónicas, a genre with no direct equivalent in the Anglophone canon. Crónicas mix reportage and fiction, in a manner akin to gonzo journalism. They favour subjective accounts and firsthand experience over hard data and rigid chronology. Melchor’s crónicas collate rumours, folk myths, and personal narratives, injecting reportage where necessary.
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
To kick off the autumn column, our contributors bring you three novels that invite unexpected encounters with time. A recommendation from former TC submissions reader SAMUEL JENSEN trains our sights on the future of the American dream; with LILY LUCAS HODGES, we unearth an artifact of historical erasure; and with HILDEGARD HANSEN, we finally transcend history through prose that gropes at the primordial core of life.
Alexander Sammartino’s Last Acts; recommended by Reader-Emeritus Samuel Jensen.
I picked up Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel, Last Acts, because of the cover. Seeing it at the book store, it was as if someone had walked up the road from my childhood home, aimed their camera across the arroyo, and snapped a picture. I’m from El Paso, Texas and Sammartino’s novel is set in Phoenix, Arizona—two very different places—but still: a sunbleached strip mall with a gun shop in it, burning under a merciless blue sky? It was like running into someone you’re not sure you wanted to see again.
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
July in Western Massachusetts is a month of heightened sensation. Perceptions are focused by the burning and buzzing heat, until it bursts in its own excess, dripping or pouring from the sky. It is an excess that ferments rather than rots, and it is what makes July so intoxicating. The onset of climate change, bringing merciless humidity and monsoon weather patterns, has deepened and darkened this character. Amid this, our Editorial Assistants AIDAN COOPER, CIGAN VALENTINE, and SIANI AMMONS have been reading books that match the month’s potency: storytelling that dazzles, prose that floods and sweeps away the sane, and historical truths delivered in lightning-bolt cracks.
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Celebrating 15 Years