Survival Skills
A greyhound refuses to run. The dog—bred for explosive speed and vicious grace—instead limps and cowers through the opening pages of Jean Ryan’s debut story collection, Survival Skills.
Boneland
Capture the flux of three generations across multiple states. Sketch it out in striking images. Weave it through with the tissues—tight and narrow here, loose and tenuous there—that make up a clan.
If A Stranger Approaches You
Novelist and poet Laura Kasischke knows well the dangers lurking in dark corners of suburbia and explores the myth-like quality of its underbelly in her first story collection, If a Stranger Approaches You.
Corporeality
With deceptive quietness, Hollis Seamon’s second collection of short stories, Corporeality, offers a penetrating look at ten sets of lives. These lives are stunningly beautiful, despite or—in Seamon’s hands—because they are ordinary.
Spectacle
The female narrators in Susan Steinberg’s third short story collection, Spectacle, are direct. They confess. They repeat themselves and contradict, edging closer to an approximation of their experience.
The Immigrant
Dhruv found this faux French restaurant—a restaurant of sorts but perhaps more of a cafeteria—off the bypass road of a highway called Research Boulevard, close to his hotel. There were many of these restaurants all over the southern and midwestern states to which Dhruv traveled for work, and he had eaten in most of them. […]
The Violet Hour
Though reductive and imperfect, it’s not so inaccurate to describe good fiction as the conscientious charting of interesting mistakes. By that metric, Katherine Hill’s debut novel, The Violet Hour, succeeds in nearly every measure.
What You Are Now Enjoying
Each of Gerkensmeyer’s thirteen stories envisions an altered reality, a place nearly identical to realistic American life with a single cog gone wonky.
Reward for Bravery
[hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] I was born on a hill two blocks back from the Pacific Ocean. I was born in a garage apartment that I never saw, and then my parents moved even farther from the shore. That was before my father went back to Vietnam, taken with […]
Ghosts (Winner of the 2012 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, Selected by Jane Hamilton)
[hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] The old man will die in the river room. This is decided before they arrive, by a primly efficient nurse named Anna, who has been hired at great expense from the hospice center in Bristol. She greets them in the driveway, coffee cup in hand. […]