Panio Gianopoulos
Nouvella ($10)
Panio Gianopoulos’s debut novella A Familiar Beast spans seventy-two pages in a 4”x6” format, but it reads like a long short story–think Alice Munro or perhaps an elaborate yarn from Stuart Dybek. The novella covers familiar territory for short fiction: domestic strife, confronting one’s relationship to nature. But with Gianopoulos’s knack for urban modernity, his precise and inventive syntax, and a narrator whose flaws are complex and compelling, he manages to dismiss the question of genre altogether and provide readers a fully realized work.