JOSHUA GRANT

Mad Max: Fury Road may be a twist-free, two-hour car chase—but that’s not all it is. Director George Miller has seen to that. Like the otherworldly Frankenstein’s-monster vehicles from the film, Fury Road packs an impressive amount of substance (most of it explosive) onto a recognizable chassis.

I’ve always had a soft spot for literature that captures life through the eyes of a child, because children are weird. Childhood is a framework that offers so many opportunities—life to a child is simultaneously light, surreal, frightening, and important in ways that adults so easily forget.

Kate Racculia’s Bellweather Rhapsody is a hotel story that mirrors other hotel stories. Imagine, if you will, that Wes Anderson had written and directed The Shining. Four characters? Not enough quirk. Better: an entire orchestra of precocious high-school musicians (and their chaperones). How precocious? Very precocious.

I picked up the short story collection The Pull of the Moon after hearing Julie Paul read part of “Squirrel People” at an event. I thought the story was funny, but Paul warned me that not all of the stories in the collection would be like that. I told her that was okay.

The Final Testimony of Raphael Ignatius Phoenix is both the first and last book by author Paul Sussman. That is to say it’s Sussman’s first, unpublished novel that was published after the writer’s sudden death in 2012.

Some novels grab you right away with strong, specific detail, forcing you into the head of a relatable character. Such novels are easy to fall in love with. Alexandra Leggat’s The Incomparables is not one of those novels. Its surface is resistant at first, and difficult throughout.

Ursula Pflug’s Motion Sickness is a flash novel about a young woman named Penelope. Each of its 55 chapters is told in exactly 500 words, on a single page, and faces a scratchboard drawing by S.K. Dyment. Though Pflug’s economical and often poetic writing help to tell the story, the scratchboards give the story its nocturnal ambience. This is appropriate.

It’s hard to know what to make of the oddball protagonists in Bill Gaston’s latest collection of short stories compiled under the title Juliet Was a Surprise.

To say that John Paul Fiorentino’s latest book, I’m Not Scared of You or Anything, is a book of short stories isn’t entirely accurate.

I like the idea of a novel that doesn’t explain itself, where the narrative gets so lost in itself that it seems to have a life of its own.