I first discovered Christopher Barzak a few months before I moved to Korea. A friend of mine mentioned his book The Love We Share Without Knowing which is, among other things, about expatriation in Japan. While Japan is certainly not Korea, I thought it might be nice to get a glimpse at what I was…
edward j rathke lives here and there, finds his name in print occasionally, but mostly stares at the walls and waits for stories to fall out. His debut novel, Ash Cinema, was published by KUBOA Press.
I doubt that anyone would argue that the two novellas of Could You Be With Her Now are not different stories. I mean, “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” focuses on danger experienced by a mentally challenged fifteen year old, told in his own words. To the contrary, “May-September” omniscient tracks…
David S. Atkinson is the author of Bones Buried in the Dirt. His writing has appeared in [PANK], The Rumpus, Grey Sparrow Journal, Interrobang?!, Atticus Review, & others. He spends his non-literary time as a patent attorney in Denver.
There are three things I like about Sightings, BJ Hollars’s debut short story collection: it’s simple, funny, and insightful. Sightings aptly begins with a quote from Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree: “It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so…
Megan Paonessa is the co-founder of Flying House, an annual artist-writer collaboration project based out of Chicago. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she has served as an assistant fiction editor for Black Warrior Review and has recently completed her first novel.
In some ways, Michael Kimball’s Big Ray felt like I was reading from a dirge, a long melancholy hymn fractured into broken pieces, unified by Kimball’s troubled melody. There were too many parallels I identified with, too many details I understood too well to read this without a conflicted sense of empathy. Kimball bares all…
Peter Tieryas (Liu) is the author of Watering Heaven. He alternates between VFX for movies and writing when he’s not traveling with his wife. His stories are published or forthcoming in the Bitter Oleander, Camera Obscura, decomP, The Evergreen Review, and The Indiana Review.
First published in France in 1938 and introduced to me by the wonderful Rikki Ducornet, the stories in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Oriental Tales do more than just confront the power of desire, they promote it to immense and terrifying dimensions. In Kali Beheaded, the gorgeous virgin goddess Kali is massacred by jealous fellow gods, who re-attach her head to…
Adam Novy is the author of a novel, The Avian Gospels, published by Hobart. His work has been published in Dossier, The Believer, The Collagist, The Denver Quarterly, and American Letters and Commentary.
In From the Hilltop, Toni Jensen’s first short story collection, Jensen shapes worlds where grief births silence and mourning accompanies shifts in weather and landscape, making land a character, one who can feel and act humans do. Rainfall accompanies a teacher/student relation in “Learning How to Drown”; a cornfield moves from place to place, arriving near the…
A Texas woman with a British soul, Deb Crombie, deftly weaves wonderfully tangled webs of mystery around Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. Both are employed by the London Police and find themselves solving one complex crime after another while becoming hopelessly personally involved. In The Sound Of Broken Glass, Gemma is challenged by the salacious…
MaryAnne Kolton’s work has appeared publications including the Lost Children Charity Anthology, Thrice Fiction and Connotation Press among others. Her story “A Perfect Family House” was shortlisted for The Glass Woman Prize.
The First Gulf War began in 1990, and I was worried about being drafted. Thinking about such a thing in reference to this war seems ridiculous now but, at the time, with the ghosts of Vietnam swirling around us, I was worried. I watched the news and wondered if Iraq would be Generation X’s war.…
Patrick Hicks is the author of Finding the Gossamer and This London. He is also the editor of A Harvest of Words, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in the Midwest where he is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College. In the summer months you'll usually find him poking around Northern Ireland.
These people that litter Mary Miller’s stories in Big World are nearly broken and almost just as unlikable. Or that is to say they are living mostly unlikable lives, because Miller’s characters — the predominance of which are young, underachieving women — are not unlikable in the ways, say, Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen…
Peter Sheehy has, over the years, organized his bookcases thusly: by title, by author, by date, by publisher, by color, by bookstore, by (living) writers he'd most like to sleep with, and once with the spines facing in, but what a disaster that was.
As a product of the blah-inducing New England suburban sprawl, I remember being fascinated by Appalachia. That rugged, heavily forested mountain corridor that isn’t out West but is still mysterious territory to a child of I-95’s coastal homogeneity, its intrigue made large by middle school textbooks describing the fortitude of the legendary settlers of the…