This week, we review some standout fiction, including James McBride's The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, "a mesmerizing work" that opens in 1972, when construction workers in Pottstown, Pa., find a skeleton at the bottom of a well; Prophet, Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché's "tightly paced, genre-bending tale" that imagines the weaponization of nostalgia; Diane Williams's collection of flash fiction, I Hear You're Rich, with its "witty, bare-bones, and remarkably intricate glimpses into the human condition"; and The Horrible Bag of Terrible Things, an "exhilarating, spooky" middle-grade horror novel by Rob Renzetti. Plus so many more!
In The Writer's Life, Iran-born and British-educated Stephen Aryan describes his influences and The Judas Blossom, the first book in a Persian-inspired fantasy trilogy.