A nuanced and emotionally relentless story. As fascinating as it is beautifully written and compassionate
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Short Fiction
Nobody’s Looking
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.
Pyrophitic
In the tinder-dry Southwest, a few natural species, pyrophites, manage to tolerate the intense heat of wildfires—even need it to survive. So, too, for the women in the chancy terrain of Susan DeFreitas’s new story, negotiating flare-ups of human heat, lust and betrayal, choice and consequence.
Simple Pleasures
Amidst the known and predictable elements of this world, A.W. Marshall’s fictions open up uncanny new spaces, ruled by the unexpected, the inexplicable. Thanks to mysterious encounters and turns of event, the very human characters in Simple Pleasures come to experience life as “weirder and full of more possibility” than before.
Heart Full of Tinders
Heart Full of Tinders is a hybrid—it is not quite poetry, and it is not quite prose either. The book exists in the space between these forms, just as we all exist in gray spaces–our bodies in slow decay from day to day, our bodies that vie for dominance over the less tangible, but arguably more real, human soul.
Twenty-Something
The short fictions of Twenty-Something flirt and sparkle through moments, both small and large, of a young life. Tatiana Ryckman’s steady hand and clear vision give these stories a sense of beautiful independence with a pleasing touch of melancholy.
A Pile of Crosses
Each story in Steven Ostrowski’s enthralling collection A Pile of Crosses provides us with a vivid, electrifying glimpse at the life we might have led, and the friends and lovers we lost and found along the way. These are the best kinds of stories: honest and invigorating.
The Abridged Autobiography of Yousef R. & Other Stories
Joseph Rathgeber’s The Abridged Autobiography of Yousef R. is a taut, piercing collection of short stories, filled with a mordant sense of humor and keen insight into the messy, discordant, wildly unpredictable state of contemporary American life.
Superhero Questions
Beatific, luminous tales in the expressionistic tradition. Haunting to the extreme.
A Jellyfish for Every Name
David Rawson’s A Jellyfish for Every Name is a collection of short stories that almost connect to each other, sharing characters and images that resonate throughout. The characters in these stories are also attempting to connect (through family, relationships, religion, science, and history) but are failing.