In Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books), Viktor has high hopes of playing for the NHL in America. When a plane crash kills all his teammates, including his secret boyfriend, Nikolai, Viktor is left alone to gather up his grief. There is no triumph over pain, but like any aging athlete knows, learning to live with the hurt makes…

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…

In The Geography of First Kisses (Kallisto Gaia Press), one finds portrayals of quiet elegance reminiscent of early-20th-century art films. The fourteen ethereal stories are tethered to the bays and backwaters of southern Louisiana, the fields of Iowa and Oklahoma, the pine woods of Florida, places where girls and women seek love and belonging, and…

Kalamazoo is a town brimming with poetry, and so us fiction writers have to stick together.  I’ve known Andy Mozina for twenty years, ever since he came here to teach creative writing at Kalamazoo College, and I’ve been marveling at his work ever since reading his short story “Cowboy Pile,” in which he creates a…

Considered Virginia Woolf’s greatest novel, Mrs. Dalloway tells the story of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman in post-World War I England. As she is preoccupied with the last-minute details of dinner party, Clarissa is flooded with remembrances of the past, in the process reexamining the choices she has made,…

Tucker Leighty-Phillips is going to have to change his bio at some point.  On his website, he tells readers that “Last year, [he] turned 31 and didn’t tell anyone.  This year, [he’s] back in Kentucky for the first time in a decade.”  I’m guessing he won’t stay thirty-one forever, and besides, his debut collection, Maybe…

I met Donnaldson Brown when she joined the 2020 cohort of Bookgardan, the low-res writing program that I direct for Craigardan artist residency center. She’d already finished her first novel, and while she worked on her second she generously shared her unique, largely non-textual method for developing fully-dimensional fictional worlds and characters, likely informed by…

Caroline Cole had a nickname for the days when she ditched school to sneak into the public library and snatch a book or two: Stay Gone Days. Little did she know the nickname would soon reflect her relationship with her sister, too. Haunted by secrets and by the death of their father, Stay Gone Days…

In his debut novel, The Man with Wolves for Hands (Southeast Missouri State Univ Press), Juan Eugenio Ramirez creates a layer of stories within the narrative where inanimate objects become autonomous and the mundane becomes significant. Demonstrating a truly original imagination, a vivid backdrop is developed for a man living with wolf’s heads where his…

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,…

Photo by Heidi SellJaye Viner and I used to pass each other in the eighty-year-old corridors of Arts and Sciences Hall at the university where I taught and she was earning her second graduate degree. That was five years ago, and while we said hello to each other, we never crossed paths in an actual…

I’ve loved Michelle Ross’ writing since I first encountered her stories during our MFA fiction workshops at Indiana University. Since then, Ross has published There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the Moon City Short Fiction Award, and her second collection Shapeshifting, winner of the Stillhouse Press Short Story Award, was published in…