Orphan trains. Discovery of new moss species. Anti/love stories across race, ability, and socioeconomic class. Experimental animal blood transfusions. Leah Angstman’s debut short story collection Shoot the Horses First has delightful, and sometimes gruesome, historical fiction gems to entertain and educate about how far we’ve come as a society—and how far we have yet to […]
Luke Dani Blue’s debut collection Pretend It’s My Body: Stories places trans and queer people’s experiences at center stage in these stories about identity. They blend features of sci-fi, the surreal, horror, and psychological realism to tell the story of what it means to live in between. One of the great strengths of this collection […]
In Chaitali Sen’s A New Race of Men from Heaven, stories trade in understatement rather than flash, and it is this quality of restraint that activates their considerable power. Sen’s precise, unadorned sentences leave ample space between the lines, as if to give her characters sufficient room to navigate life’s challenges. Consider Dhruv, the protagonist […]
Photo by Kovid Rathee on Unsplash I. School, and she can’t breathe, and she forgot her inhaler again. She keeps forgetting, can’t keep things straight. Forgot her lunch last week, twice. The inhaler should stay with the nurse, but she needs it so often that she now keeps it in her desk, takes puffs once […]
Love and Other Rituals is an inspiring story collection that explores a wide range of Filipino characters who are moving through the world trying to understand love and the rituals that come along with it. The stories roam the Philippine Islands from Baguio, a beautiful mountainous area, to the busy streets of Manila and Cebu, […]
In a classroom, around the turn of the century, some writers and a professor gathered to dissect an early draft of a story. The professor asked the group, “What happens? Where’s the end?” The writers gave competing opinions until the author finally said, “We don’t know. That’s the point.” The beleaguered professor tossed a pair […]
Photo by Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash After Carl left me for a woman he met buying manure off Craigslist, I put in for an out-of-state letter carrier transfer with the postal service. I wanted a fresh start, a chance to discover something. It didn’t matter what. I wanted to learn something I never would […]
As the child of famous punk parents, Margot Highsmith is a daughter of privilege. When we first meet her, on a plane from New York to Montana, she seems in a bad way, though it’s not apparent why. What follows is a retrograde retelling of Margot’s life leading up to the moment when she abandons […]
Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow, published in May of 2022 by Catapult, is a groundbreaking collection of short fiction depicting queer life with remarkable depth and complexity. Conklin’s multidimensional characters are refreshingly, and sometimes disturbingly, prototypical, refusing to fit into neat categories. The myriad existential struggles and ethical dilemmas characters undergo lack tidy resolutions, and are […]
One of very few things that can be safely said about fiction is that stories offer writers and readers experiences. Robert Frost famously said of writing poems, “no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” I quote that line a lot because I think it’s lovely and worth memorizing, but I know it’s […]