May, 01 2019 | no responses
Set in modern-day America, Rosson’s impressive, character-driven fantasy is focused on two tortured souls, both haunted by past transgressions and both seeking atonement.
Fiction
Apr, 30 2019 | no responses
Wall examines the darker alleys of human existence and the more questionable seams of Irish culture, politics, and social life, with tough-mindedness and compassion ironically well matched. He is rightly described as an insufficiently known Irish master whose work is astonishingly tender, eerie and, yet, full of human anguish and promise.
Apr, 10 2019 | no responses
In Mark Mayer’s impressive debut collection of short stories, a circus or aerialist never actually makes an appearance. Mayer deftly applies the theme obliquely instead, letting the associations around the circus stand in for what is just beyond our reach, for the freak inside us, for our vanishing acts in relationships and in death.
Apr, 09 2019 | no responses
Rogoff casts his characters’ lives through the various looking glasses of memory, memoir, and myth until none of the characters—and least of all the reader—can be sure of the details, only their profound importance. The facts remain shrouded, but the consequences pierce the dark, loud as a loon’s call, shattering moments of quiet reflection and startling narrator and reader alike into new states of understanding. There is vanity in thinking one knows another person, and Ezra must confront the unrecognizable heart of his closest friend in order to discover a new and deeper intimacy. It is here, in the gap between objective and subjective, rational and intuitive, that subtler truths emerge.
Apr, 02 2019 | no responses
The world that Felver’s characters inhabit is cold and unforgiving, rife with poverty and violence. These are desperate, lonely characters waging their own private wars on the world: the couple in “Queen Elizabeth” wrangling with a devastating loss, the young brother and sister in “Evolution of the Mule” bilking travelling businessmen with a rigged game, the two boys in “Out of the Bronx” hunting rats and setting them ablaze.
Mar, 26 2019 | no responses
When I was ten, playing in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, I gathered up some old Mason jars and built a zoo. Grasshoppers, dragonflies, toads, daddy longlegs—the whole gang was there. I poked air holes in the lids, and when it stormed that night, all of the animals drowned. Distraught, I held a funeral service and, in a small clearing in the woods, built a cemetery with sticks and smooth rocks.