Reading Amparo Dávila’s stories is like accepting an invitation for tea at a haunted house. It starts out ordinary, mundane even, and before you know it, the key turns in the lock and you are trapped.

The deaths were coming more frequently now. It was almost a weekly expectation to learn, through an acquaintance, the phone, or even Facebook, of a new death. Friends and distant acquaintances died of cancer of the colon, breasts, prostate, bones, liver—it was almost always cancer. But also heart disease, lung disease, stroke, diabetes. Sometimes the death could be attributed to human error rather than a natural cause. A car accident, for example. Nonetheless, even these could usually be traced back to mistakes made by the human mind, dulling as it atrophied in old age. The ravages of time within the interior of our bodies, expressed through the degeneration or sudden demise of our exterior selves.

How do we negotiate the spaces in which cultures meet? How do we balance our desire for tradition with an increasingly global world? What do we do when the understanding and support of a loving family isn’t enough?

When he finds out about the gastrectomy, Pedro does not buy the first flight back home to Brazil. He hangs up the phone, walks over to the bathroom and knocks on the door more forcefully than usual.

Tyler ate fire ants. He didn’t eat them out of hunger, and he didn’t eat them often. But when he did, he made sure no one knew. On any given blade of grass, he would find the ants slowly crawling their way up and over and around. He would uproot them. Take the blade, with the ants circling and circling, and he would shove it in his mouth.

As Jane slurped down her third cocktail, she kept eye contact with the anglerfish. It drifted up to the glass and away, its fluorescent light twitching in front of its gruesome face. Maybe Jane was projecting, but the anglerfish seemed like it was unhappy. Or maybe it was just ugly.

Another Scratch into a Postmodern Rabbit Hole

One way to talk about Haruki Murakami’s eighteenth work of fiction, Killing Commendatore, is as a bingo square. Many of Murakami’s usual suspects, whimsical tropes, and narrative-style of blurring the fantastic with the mundane in his works are present. Murakami creates a space for a nameless, recently divorced man as a protagonist, a space for supernatural occurrences, another for vivid descriptions about domestic chores. He creates a center space for female characters who are complex, supernatural forces at best, and reduced to coy, sexual objects at worst. The dialogue often consists of repeating what the protagonist has said. Bingo! Murakami’s characters’ lives are often described through a litany of what and how they ate and how they slept. The precise articulation of the mundane makes his more fantastical elements even more complicated and gorgeously weird.

Addiction doesn’t disappear, it only changes forms. I was hooked on idleness, but now I’m hooked on work. I was hooked on weed, now I inject Ketamine. I was hooked on Azadeh, now I’m hooked on Jaleh. I was hooked on being free of family ties, but now I’m hooked on my father.

A short story by classic Japanese mystery and horror writer Edogawa Ranpo, translated from Japanese by Lin King.

Crime novels are often just entry points to examining culture and society. In a tense, concentrated form, mysteries give writers the perfect excuse to look beyond the illusions of an orderly reality and, by following a determined system, can gracefully and entertainingly peel back layers of deception to find real revelations about our lives and ourselves. Mystery novelist Tana French is no exception to this rule, but in The Witch Elm she has provided readers with something that feels quite new.

Kate Atkinson’s inspiration for her latest novel Transcription initially came from a document released by the National Archives detailing the work of a WW2 agent known as “Jack King.” “Jack” was Eric Roberts, an outwardly pedestrian bank clerk who, in secret, worked for MI5 to infiltrate Fascist circles. He had posed as a Gestapo agent during the war, renting an apartment where he would meet regularly with British Fascists and various sympathizers who confided in Roberts with nefarious plots and plans. These meetings were then transcribed into documents over a hundred pages for the records of British intelligence. The technology for recording was not as advanced as it is now; there were, one could imagine, many gaps in the conversation that needed to be filled in.

Barry Cohen is on the lam. Multi-billionaire hedge-fund capitalist, collector of expensive watches, and engineer of the intricate mechanisms that trap him in his tony, Manhattan penthouse life — Barry packs his favorite timepieces into a rollerboard and absconds in the middle of the night. Ditching his credit cards, his wallet, all that ties him to his tremendous wealth, he boards a Greyhound bus headed for a college ex-girlfriend in Richmond, Virginia. Wife Seema is in the rearview, along with their son, Shiva, struggling with seemingly low-functioning autism in a world that barely forgives imperfections. A grain of sand in the clockwork of 1-percenter privilege.

It was you, wasn’t it, Belmira? I know you can’t hear me, now that you’ve gone someplace far away and there’s no point in thinking you’ll ever come back. I’m alone, I and our secret, and I don’t even know how long I’ll be able to keep it, because the note, forgive me, Bel, I think I left the damn thing at Antonio’s house, I don’t know exactly where, but in that moment of shock, I ended up dropping the envelope in the middle of all that mess and only realized I’d left it behind when I’d already made it out into the street.