In K Chess’ imaginative and timely debut novel, Famous Men Who Never Lived, 156,000 Universally Displaced Persons (UDPs) have traveled through a mysterious opening in the universe to a parallel New York. A lottery system decides which people transfer through “the Gate.”
Read MoreMany of the worlds inhabited by the women in A Bright and Pleading Dagger, the flash fiction collection by Nicole Rivas, are slightly off-kilter, highlighting how strange and unsettling reality can be.
Read MoreDorothy Chan could take me anywhere—as poet, foodie, or allied traveler—and I would willingly oblige. Garnering every emotion from fear to revulsion to arousal, her debut poetry collection, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, celebrates being awake and aware in the places where one person’s past becomes another’s present.
Read MoreIn Sherrie Flick’s Thank Your Lucky Stars (Autumn House Press), stars invoke gratitude, an awe for the infinity that floats just above our heads, and an appreciation for the strange ways in which life often plays out.
Read MoreYou are standing in the middle of a room. A girl approaches, presses your hand, and says, “I want to tell you a story.” She does not get very far when another girl enters from another door. She skips up, presses your other hand, and says, “Don’t listen to her. Listen to me.”
Read MoreWhat remains once all but the essential is stripped away forms the backbone of flash fiction. In The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, Sarah Layden shows that the act of paring down to see what’s left can also expose the truth of who a person is.
Read MoreOn the back cover of Tomb Song, Julián Herbert looks out from behind a glass window. The photographer’s reflection obscures the curves of Herbert’s face, turning him into a vague suggestion of himself. This image perfectly captures the elusive temperament of Tomb Song...
Read MoreThink on the name “Shia LaBoeuf” and a differing series of images may come to mind: the boy in a family sitcom who lives for nothing more than tormenting his older sister. The teenager banished to the desert to dig an endless series of holes with his misfit friends.
Read MoreAs a monk may fast in penance, Stephen Florida wants his championship “bad enough to starve for it.” He has to be 133 pounds at weigh-in before a meet. He dines on broccoli and celery, allows himself to drink only “two allotted cups of skim milk.”
Read MoreIt begins with flowers: roses and periwinkles on a christening robe that wither and fade over time. A procession of girls scatter lupins beneath their feet. The luster and color of the imagery in Wioletta Greg's Swallowing Mercury might draw comparisons to jewels, but the truth of this collection is far more organic, riotous, and messy than any stone.
Read MoreFriends. The ones you’ve known for years and the ones you just clicked with straightaway. The ones you feel like you’ve known forever and the ones you hope you’ll never forget. The fun ones. The loud, in your face, I’m-a-bit-mad-me ones.
Read MoreThe festering pink eye of a needle mark on a loved one's arm. A grenade rolling to a stop at the foot of a coffee table. Small in stature but huge in their psychic capacity, giant in their ability to inflict our imaginations with the pain of an unspeakable past or a terrifying near future.
Read MoreStephanie Ash’s The Annie Year (Unnamed Press, October 2016) has all the components of novels I like: strong, conflicted women, small town perils (lethargy, meth), youth that do things like ruin annual high school musicals.
Read MoreWho is Miwi La Lupa? Besides being a talented multi-instrumentalist, La Lupa is a singer-songwriter in his own right who just released Beginner’s Guide, his third solo album, and, if you’re anything like me, maybe it’s just the type of music you need right about now.
Read MoreIt isn’t just the album of the year, it’s the one we need to get through it. A track-by-track annotated guide to Hiss Golden Messenger’s Heart Like a Levee.
Read MoreMusic sounds better in LA. I don’t know why, it just does. I suspect Angel Olsen knew this when she went out there to record My Woman, the follow-up to 2011’s critically lauded Burn Your Fire for No Witness, an album that’s still to this day as calming at times as it is haunting.*
Read MoreThe truest physical expression of human empathy may well be to cringe: the grimace, the shoulders drawn to the ears, eyes narrowing or going shut. Cringing is an involuntary response to another’s humiliation or pain that reinforces compassionate connections with others.
Read MoreSomething crucial to understanding the world of Kristine Ong Muslim’s collection Age of Blight is revealed in its wonderfully weird story “Zombie Sister.” Once clinically dead, the narrator’s sister, Beth, has returned to life, of some sort (the attending doctor is casual, commenting, “Every family has one”).
Read MoreIn a pivotal scene in Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars (Burlesque Press, 2015), the ten-year-old narrator flips through a children’s illustrated guide to the Bible to find several pages stapled closed.
Read MoreBeth Gilstrap’s I Am Barbarella (Twelve Winters Press, 2015) opens with a Carson McCullers quote: “I am not meant to be alone, and without you, who understands.”
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