Doing our best since 2009
Perhaps you’d like to join our newsletter?
I remember when I first started wearing gloves. My mother gave me a “training” pair. I was hesitant, nervous, and shoving my knuckles into that small space felt so claustrophobic I began to cry. “You’ll get used to it soon enough,” she said, but as my fingers began to feel dewy with the constant shelter…
The experience of a young adult returning home after a long absence is not always a simple one. Warm feelings of nostalgia mingle with darker memories—the ones childhood so expertly preserves. Compounding the interior turmoil is the exhausting daily task of presenting a new self to those who persist in seeing only the former child…
Resist the temptation to employ metafictional techniques to mock your partner’s propensity for sending the story back to you after having added nothing more than a few paragraphs examining the origin of a single word or phrase.
These Worn Bodies (Moon City Press, Nov. 1, 2024) by Avitus B. Carle is collection of flash fiction that is wondrous in its form and its imagination. Bodies are deconstructed to discrete parts (boobs! orgasms!) or made of paper or popcorn. Flies are elevated to main characters. Agency is for everyone. Both societal and genre…
When an old Soviet satellite wipes out a Parisian hypermarket, the explosion kills a landlord and gives his tenant, Gerard Fulmard, a temporary reprieve from paying his rent. Despite living only a few hundred yards from the obliterated hypermarket, Fulmard––protagonist of Jean Echenoz’s Command Performance––prefers to find out what’s happening by switching on his television…
Ranging from a custodian at an underfunded college to a medicine man living in a temple dedicated to San Simon, the patron saint of alcohol and cigarettes, the characters in Jared Lemus’s Guatemalan Rhapsody (Ecco Press) find themselves at defining moments in their lives, where sacrifices may be required of them, by them, or for…
In Doctor Faustus, Mephistophilis offers the hero a hell of deal: twenty-four years of fortune, followed perhaps by some minor burning. The temptation, which plays on the common reflex of “take now, worry later,” is an inversion of narrative: for Faustus, who knows how the story will end, the real excitement is in getting there.…
My research for my debut novel, Moral Treatment, began when I was a kid, exploring the park-like grounds of the Traverse City State Hospital. A sprawling, residential psychiatric facility on the west side of my hometown…