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The Way You Want to Be Loved

In Aruni Kashyap’s collection of thirteen short stories, The Way You Want to Be Loved, characters tied to Assam confront familial guilt, racism, homophobia, and the isolation endured by young people living far from home. As the stories cross oceans and time periods, Kashyap keeps readers engaged with his impeccably developed characters as they forge…

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Recent posts

  • On The Air

    David Zimmer felt like he lived at the end of the line, at the bottom of the barrel, or at a frequency so low that it could only be heard by whales. Being the last name on any roll or list was just part of it. What festered was a feeling of being left out,…


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  • Sayonara LA

    Lena’s nephew has a meltdown just as they are sitting down for the Christmas meal. His screeches are a detonated bomb, obliterating all the rosiness and holiday cheer with the sonar equivalent of blinding white light.


  • What About Fiction: A Conversation

    We (Susan and Corey) have been discussing writing for years. Every Monday, Corey sends out a ‘Monday Poem’ written by a seriously fabulous poet. Susan always responds…


  • What We Might Become

    Change is often imagined as a moment of high drama—a birth or death, a calamity or a great good fortune, a stroke of luck, good or bad. But change rarely happens all at once. More often, change occurs as a series of events, of decisions and revisions, of slow bloomings or strangulations, until you wonder…


  • Disappearing Acts

    On my fourteenth birthday, My Hunger stepped out of my body and sat beside me at my party. She looked me up and down before wrapping both hands around my slice of red velvet cake and whispered,  “Well, I heard they get the colour from dead beetles anyway.”  My mother denied this, looked right through…


  • Good Night, Sleep Tight

    The stories in Good Night, Sleep Tight are unsettling, weird, and sometimes downright terrifying. Each story engages tropes of sci-fi and horror, weaving humanoid robots,  themes of mothering and familial relationships, and characters trapped in their own minds and bodies in ways that push past the boundaries of reality. Altogether the stories create a pervasive…


  • Floreana

    I wasn’t planning to write another penguin novel. In the spring before My Last Continent was published, I’d traveled to the Galápagos Islands to see penguins and other wildlife—it wasn’t meant to be a research trip. Yet it turned into one after I learned about the bizarre human history of Floreana Island.


  • Is There Still Gold In the American River?

    Yep.  It’s not worth trying for. But if you don’t it just sits there.  Before we moved up to the foothills, I fished off trawlers in the San Francisco Bay. Slow months of rockfish and salmon. Then a week in early spring brought an apocalypse of herring. The low tide  white with sperm. Rocks and…


  • Lesser Ruins

    A novel in three paragraphs, Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins is no beach read. In an all but unbroken 276-page stream of prose, Lesser Ruins probes the deepest crevices of the brain of its narrator, a middling community college professor and self-described “Montaignian” whose lifelong, and frequently destructive, obsession with the philosopher lurches him to the…