Listen to our podcast of this story here. Nights when Polk cannot hunt the dogs, he instead attacks his father. He has grown to crave the hot pain spreading over his face, the bulging of his knuckles when they connect with bone. His father fights back just enough. They roll around on the floor, […]
The range of work gives the collection a texture of the unexpected. While many themes recur, their treatments often feel playfully new.
Southworth creates surprising characters and unique narrative structures that stimulate intense thought and emotion. Everyone Here Has a Gun is a short story collection crafted in a new way, with at least one story for every different kind of reader.
The stories in Seven Views of the Same Landscape demonstrate no simple progression toward moral clarity, no straight line, just disillusionment and failure and the hard-won glimmers of insight that help Sara envision a future that won’t repeat the past.
“There is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain […]
I grew up in Connecticut. More often than not, when I mention this to new acquaintances there’s a presumption that my childhood consisted of languid days on the golf course and tennis matches at the local country club—a presumption that the word “Connecticut” is shorthand for rich and privileged. When I see that knowing look […]
How do we memorialize twentieth century atrocities? And who decides what, why, and how we remember? As James Young, a professor of English and Judaic Studies whose scholarly work has focused on memorials to atrocities, writes in The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993), “Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives are […]
Trapeze artists and animals. Freaks and clowns. Crowds, high-wires and swallowed swords. In the same way listeners raised on digital music still recognize a scratched-record sound in a radio ad, the images in Ana Maria Shua’s Without a Net evoke a circus whether or not we have been to one.
In this era saturated with polarization: political, religious and economic, where opposing forces take sides through every available media mouthpiece, Ru Freeman’s second novel On Sal Mal Lane is a soothing balm from the daily assault of divisiveness.
Forbes is a master of creating high tension and drama in the simplest of movements and actions.