As I read this novel during the fall of 2018, the nation collectively returned to the summer of ’82. Everyone, it seemed, was glued to coverage of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh’s testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee and their recollections of that summer.
The war has continued for so long now that an entire generation has never known a time that we didn’t have soldiers in the Middle East. It’s depressing and easy to forget—two reasons (but not the only reasons) that Glori Simmons’s latest story collection, Carry You, is so important.
Laura Leigh Morris’s tales from the fictional town of Brickton, West Virginia give readers a bird’s-eye view into a world that feels at times economically and socially left behind.
What you have here is a collection of loosely connected stories set in northern Arkansas, full of characters motivated, to a large degree, by their own unscrupulousness. They are hardscrabble, morally questionable, and sometimes even violent people. They are also supremely entertaining.
With his 220-page story of Saul Indian Horse, Wagamese delivers a near-perfect analogy to the history of the First Nation peoples of Canada.
Numbers can get you places. They are like airplanes and bicycles, buses and trains. They can tell you how much you weigh and what your temperature is. They can tell you about the cost of some things and the balance of others, like ratios of sugar to flour in a recipe for cake. They can explain the laws of motion or the passing of time, the aerodynamics of specific birds based on their wing structure, why the lift of a seagull is different from that of a hawk, or an owl, or a duck. They explain why she herself cannot fly, and can prove which girl can run fastest from palm tree to palm tree because a stopwatch doesn’t lie. Numbers prove what is there in front of your eyes, what you want to see and what you wish were not true.
Containing over two hundred and thirty exceedingly short works of fiction, with very few exceeding a page in length and most no longer than a paragraph, Keith consistently manages to make each story distinctive and fully formed.
Merging crime, espionage, and absurdist fiction, French author Pierre Mac Orlan (born Pierre Dumarchey in 1882)—a prolific writer of adventure novels, erotica, songs, essays, and memoirs—constructs a compelling novel of intrigue set in the murky shadows of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
Katharine Haake provides a palliative for the shortage of thoughtful apocalyptic literature with Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld, a collection of eleven short stories, each of which explores the end of things—even if just symbolically—as a way to meditate on themes of loss and absence.
Largely ominous and somber in tone, the concise, intelligent fiction contained in Sleeping Dragons will move, intrigue, and not fade quickly from memory.