Dark, glittering, and dead serious when it’s not hilarious, The Cake, the Smoke, the Moon is a delight. Within these pages you’ll find potent gems by a master miniaturist; stories that crackle with the sheer electricity of their inventiveness. This is a book of and for the haunted among us, where only the moon (and Francine Witte) know the truth.
SOFTENING is Olivia Braley’s debut chapbook. This series of linked vignettes explore a girl’s coming-of-age as she seeks refuge within a body that is simultaneously being hardened by the world she inhabits. In its consideration of gender and girlhood, the collection seeks to interrogate what is remembered, what can’t be forgotten, and how memory manifests in the physical body.
A dead mother, a deaf cat, an ex-nun, and a waitress forced to dress as a milkmaid—these are some of the ordinary characters that populate the extraordinary stories in Christine Lasek’s Love Letters to Michigan.
Zack Bean has put together here a wonderful and memorable collection of stories. I was surprised and delighted by the unusual landscape, sometimes lush, sometimes stark, often full of secrets and always peopled by ‘bad boys’ of one kind or another. Bean’s masterful and original use of language throughout the book is an additional delight.
Joyce Goldenstern’s stories chart the fierce bonds of love and deep yearning that run across childhood, adulthood, and between generations. Set against a Midwest of the past and present, these twelve stories mine devotion, regret, betrayal, and loss, at once rich with nostalgia and the drama that inhabits ordinary lives—a testament to the enduring attachments of people and place.
Whenever I read one of Josh Penzone’s stories, from a dusty corner of my brain, I hear Charlie Rich singing, “No one knows what goes on behind closed doors.” And so it is with The Whitings. Penzone opens the doors and unlocks the secrets of his characters’ hearts, exposing the double lives of neighbors, friends, spouses, parents, children—people who thought they knew each other so well, but man, oh man, were they wrong.
Two people, who before meeting came dangerously close to extinction themselves, find connection in their concern about the demise of a species. In Fifield’s beautifully crafted story, hope is the ultimate destination as the characters come to terms with life’s wounds.
Composed of forty-four stories fewer than 2,000 words apiece, the universally-female protagonists of Girl Power each navigate a portion of the labyrinthine trail from maidenhood through motherhood and into matronhood while negotiating the many complexities of being female in the contemporary era.
A nuanced and emotionally relentless story. As fascinating as it is beautifully written and compassionate
With a tender, wised-up voice, J.R. Miller writes about the mysteries of attachment like no one else, reminding us that childhood and adulthood were never separate categories, but continuous, alive, and enmeshed.