If you haven’t run across Amina Gautier’s fiction yet, I feel safe in saying that you will. She’s the author of three award-winning short story collections, At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and most recently, The Loss of All Lost Things, and continues to publish new work in a wide variety of literary journals. A…

Within the past six years Theodore Wheeler has published three novels, Kings of Broken Things (2017), In Our Other Lives (2020), and The War Begins in Paris (2023), all three of which are set during periods of war. Set during World War I and culminating with the Red Summer of 1919, a period known for…

Caitlin Horrock’s second short story collection Life Among the Terranauts follows her debut collection This is Not Your City and her novel The Vexations. With stories set mostly in the western part of the United States (Arizona) and the Midwest (Michigan), Horrocks explores lives in locked away places—in small towns, in communes or compounds, biodomes,…

Erin McGraw’s seventh and most recent book Joy (Counterpoint, 2019) is a collection of flash fiction or “short-shorts.” Despite its cheerful title, Erin McGraw’s Joy is about anything but. In fifty-three pieces of sudden fiction, characters find joy hard to come by. A fifteen-year-old girl hears a news report of a local rape and knows…

Photo © Carolina CabanillasIn Melanie Hatter’s Malawi’s Sisters, winner of the inaugural Kimbilio National Fiction Prize (Four Way Books), three sisters from a well-to-do Washington DC family follow separate paths in life. The oldest, Kenya, follows in her parents’ footsteps, first becoming a successful attorney like her father and then a homemaker like her mother.…

Veronica looks at Ralfy’s bronze face and sees that beautiful grin, that smile that she really wants to believe exists only for her. It breaks the hardness of his face, and he seems like two boyfriends at once. Since she was thirteen, she’s seen him at all the parties, and even then she wanted to…

In the opening short story of Renee Simms’ debut collection Meet Behind Mars (Wayne State University Press), protagonist Hattie attends a literary conference and receives a disappointing manuscript critique. Her novel is rejected because it doesn’t conform to the stereotypical tropes readers and publishers ascribe to and look for in black fiction. Lacking drugs, hip…

It’s just that he’s already found what he spent his twenties looking for. How this came to be seems every bit as mysterious now as it did seventeen years ago. A geopolitical event got him sent halfway around the world, and he stumbled upon the right person. That his domestic happiness is firmly grounded in…

Marian Crotty’s debut short story collection What Counts as Love was published by the University of Iowa Press as the winner of its 2017 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. The ten stories in this collection take place in self-healing houses, rehab facilities, expatriate communities in the United Arab Emirates and various unexpected locales. Featuring mostly…

I first met Susan Muaddi Darraj at an MLA convention in Philadelphia, where she was speaking on an editor’s panel on publishing. Sometime after that I ran into her again, this time at the AWP conference, where she was signing copies of her linked short story collection Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly (University…