As Eugen Ruge’s novel In Times of Fading Light opens, the year is 2001, the place is a town named Neuendorf on the outskirts of Berlin—a town formerly in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Communist eastern half of Germany—and the characters are forty-seven-year-old Alexander Umnitzer and his aged father, Kurt.
Winner of the 2014 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Kent Nelson In black and white, two men as silhouettes at a distance across a sea of sand. A donkey between them, their outlines hazy in the blaze of day. The sky is a solid mass of barely blue, and a blur on the […]
If the rest of the world were paying attention, we might note that Romania is having an artistic renaissance. Highest of profile has been the Romanian new wave in film, with acclaimed movies from Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) and Christian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) gaining the attention and praise of international audiences.
Kilito’s style is that of a ponderous memoir with a capacity for drawing up and revealing the cultural conflicts that bunch beneath the surface of his stories.
Writing is an act often defined by the conflict between faith and despair, and though Larry is often tempted to give up, the reader will find The Biology of Luckcharged with an appealing earnestness and crafted with understated precision at the sentence level.
Kim Church’s debut novel, Byrd, tells the story of Addie Lockwood, a young bookseller in North Carolina, whose brief, ill-fated romance with an old high school crush, Roland Rhodes, results in an unwanted pregnancy.
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.