Not too long ago, Esquire knighted 2023 as “the year of the slim novel.” Now, in 2025, the world looks (and is increasingly looking) a whole lot different. With everything feeling so volatile, so uncertain, so…improper, so…imposturous, one thing has remained constant: the slim volume is thriving.
Proper Imposters from Panhandler Books features four contemporary authors who explore, through high lyricism, the vices and virtues of deception—from the personal, to the physical, to the psychological, to the profound. How do we see? How do we wish to be seen? How are we actually seen? These are but a few questions that drive and link these novellas as their characters face figments and realities, dreams and nightmares, hopes and doubts, all with inevitable consequence.
Lalita by Chaya Bhuvaneswar
Lalita radiates with pathos and perseverance. The novella pulls us into her physical and psychological world, shaped and shifted traumatically by her parents’ physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. They insult and demean her. Her father threatens her with a knife whose blade dimples her cheek. Her mother’s fingers subject her daughter to what is referred to, within the household, as “cozy-cozy.”
Throughout the story, Lalita struggles to find herself and acclimate to a world that seems against her. As Lalita flails, attempting to flee her parents and her past, we understand more deeply the strength of the current she swims against. Her present, too, is rife with racism, sexism, and misogyny, from the subtly systemic to the overtly aggressive.
Lalita’s struggles compound and bully her into eventual action, agency, and autonomy. Her past will neither haunt her, nor define her, but her present might, if she does not act.
Crowd by Mauricio Montiel Figueiras
Crowd features a dystopian city shrouded in endless winter that feels on the verge of combustion. Pencil factories run the economy while oppressed citizens freeze because they have no wood for their fireplaces. On his way to work, one accountant, Abel joins a protest that ends in bloody chaos. But the feeling of the crowd haunts Abel as he escapes the violence and goes about his day, ducking his employer who suspects he was a part of the morning’s uprising. Working late, Abel begins to unravel the true horrors of the city, and his company’s role in it. The voice of the crowd, Abel’s inner-voice, haunts him into a life-and-death decision.
The story evokes the tensions of capitalism versus class, oppression/suppression versus independence, unionizing versus union-busting, the status quo versus ethical and moral justice—and all through gorgeous, rich, maximal prose. Snow is innumerably reimagined: “…thick snowflakes, the ashes of a mute catastrophe freez[e] streets, doors, windows, awnings, cars and pedestrians into a postcard of nowhere” and, “[radio station] antennas [are] transformed by the ice into ominous sculptures” and, “On the other side of the windows the twilight has dissolved into the beginnings of night: specks of shadow alternate with the ceaseless snow, making the city into a bad copy of an old movie.”
The Body Collector by Jason Ockert
Ockert captures the essence of cinematic horror and suspense and renders it onto the page throughout The Body Collector. From the very first page, this novella tugs you to the edge of its seat. Duncan, an obese night-shift worker, struggles with the emotional and psychological baggage of his weight.
Duncan felt the crush of sadness for the boy he once was who loved the slide so much. What part did he love best? Was it darting down the slick metal, the body in unabashed motion? Was it afterward in the anticipation of doing it again as he scampered up the rungs? Was it when he sat at the top and surveyed the city around him? From that vantage point he could see the cars whizzing by and people moving with purpose. Back then he wondered where they were all headed and what they would do when they got there. When did he quit caring? When did he begin wishing all those people would disappear? When did he want himself to disappear?
The novella splits its time between Duncan and Donna: a woman who arrives to work only to discover a severed tongue on the paper cutter, and a bloody trail leading to the bathroom occupied by a moribund, gaunt Duncan. As their stories intertwine, we come to learn of Duncan’s outrageous weight-loss experiment—a deal made with a personal “devil” of sorts. The ending is just as unexpected as the horrors that reveal themselves from page-to-page—and here Ockert shines by subverting the genre in ways both poignant and promising.
G v. P by Jeff Parker
G v. P is one hell of a wild romp, following fictionalized iterations of Edgar Allan Poe and Nikolai Gogol, both the self-proclaimed greatest writer of their times, as they embark on a dark and zany “road trip” across America. Their relationship is, all at once, admirable, romantic, and contentious. In many ways, the novella is a metaphor for the artistic process. Whether via a dying shrimp “trying to hop out, thwacking its body against the steel of [a] bucket. P.’s mind had tuned into the shrimp’s desperation and fear. He had a connection to the crustacean.” Or, via a conversation with a duck whittler that G. and P. wish to purchase a decoy from:
[G.]: “I’d like one of the most expensive, one that cost you the most time.”
[Duck whittler]: “That’s not how it works. Sometimes you work long and hard on one, and it’s shit. Sometimes inspiration strikes and you hammer something out, and it’s shit. And sometimes vice versa. I sell based on quality not on investment or material. The cost is one-hundred-percent divination. I don’t charge for raw product.”
As a whole, G v. P parallels the trajectory of the artist’s making: a meandering journey full of surprise, hope, doubt, grief, self-deprecation, jealousy, as well as the fine line the artist walks between confidence and narcissism—the ooze of ego sucked out of the artist like the leeches bloodletting the protuberant nose of G., or the fears of failure like the rising waters in the ditch that P. lies paralyzed in. Both G. and P. fear being buried alive—an image that bifurcates the corporeal from the spiritual: the artist-identity gone while the corporeal person remains—and for what other purpose does G. or P. have to live for if not to create, if not to be known as the greatest writer of their time?
And for those Poe and Gogol aficionados, the story is rife with Easter eggs.
Proper Imposters is but the latest gem in the crown of the slim novel. It celebrates the form, providing us with the immediacy of the short story and the immersion, complexity, and richness of the novel.
Publisher: Panhandler Books
Publication date: January 28, 2025
Reviewed by Zachary Vickers
Zachary Vickers is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was also the Provost’s Fellow. He is the recipient of the Richard Yates Prize, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize, and the Clark Fisher Ansley Prize for Excellence in Fiction. He is the author of the short story collection, Congratulations on Your Martyrdom!, from Indiana University Press. His has appeared in Boston Review, The Saturday Evening Post, The Iowa Review, The Seattle Review, DIAGRAM, North American Review, Mid-American Review, and others. His reviews have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Cleveland Review of Books, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.