In The Lateness of the World, Carolyn Forché’s much-anticipated new poetry collection—her first in a decade and a half—offers a subtle, seamless, and altogether stunning interplay between the poetic, the personal, and the politic. Forché’s “poetry of witness” lights the reader’s path through brilliant complexities of meaning, often in lean phrases that astonish with their power and demand repeated close readings via multiple lenses.
Read MoreIn Nicole Flattery’s short story, “Track,” the narrator describes her hometown as “a strange place dressed up as a normal place.”
Read MoreMemory, together with history and storytelling, play major roles in Monica Sok’s debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On.
Read MoreABC News recently ran a story about an eighteen-year-old U.S. soldier who was about to deploy to Afghanistan—to join a war that began when he was only seven months old.
Read MoreKate Wisel’s short story collection Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, opens with an atmospheric piece of flash fiction that hovers like a dark and heavy raincloud signaling the downpour to come.
Read MoreA temp worker feeds reams of documents to a paper shredder. A scientist tracks moss in a forest.
Read MoreIt’s 1975. A teenage boy has unexpectedly died in the middle of a Denver winter after he falls through ice. In the wake of Sammy’s untimely death, a series of strange and painful lives bloom out of the frozen ground like wounded, four-limbed fauna.
Read MoreA new translation is always worth celebrating, but that is especially so with Bright by Duanwad Pimwana (translated by Mui Poopoksakul). According to the publisher, Bright is the first novel by a Thai woman to be translated into English.
Read MoreIn 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.
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