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Downstream from the Hollow

Sun drenched skin, browned with age and looking like the old wrinkled leather that it was, stretched over hands that were more tendons and prideful obstinance than strength. Jasper turned the pan in a smooth, easy motion that he had taught himself over the last forty years panning for gold. He didn’t really care if…

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Recent posts

  • The Passenger Seat

    In the opening scene of The Passenger Seat, Vijay Khurana’s elegant debut novel, two teenagers teeter, nearly naked, on the rail of a steel truss bridge. Each boy peers surreptitiously at the other. Just as the thickening eroticism threatens to break the surface of their friendship, they plunge into the narrow river. On splashdown one…


  • What Do You Want From Me?

    At least the title of my second novel, What Do You Want from Me? hasn’t changed since I started working on it more than eight years ago. Pretty much everything else has, though.


  • Catnap

    Nen was resting in the living room, as ordered. Maybe resting more than recommended. It hadn’t been that long. The cast was still on her arm. She was reading a detective novel she had read and reread maybe every six months since she had been a freshman in high school. She had the mystery memorized…


  • Alternative Facts

    Short stories can help us see the world in new ways or they can reflect the world in which we find ourselves living. The stories in Alternative Facts, the extraordinary collection by Emily Greenberg, do both. In doing so, they take risks which pay off—at least for readers who appreciate adventurous fiction.  The stories are…


  • On Crossing the Atlantic in the Fall of 1976 as a Five-Year-Old

    First there is the paper folio of tickets, parents’ excitable talk. During long afternoons, your sister holds away the delicate, flimsy sheets, but she points out her printed name there, and yours. Then, the sudden bustle of departure: the four of you crammed into the backseat of your neighbors’ station wagon, the drive down to…


  • A Lesser Light

    An elaborate and breathtaking historical novel, Peter Geye’s A Lesser Light unfolds over eight months in and around the Gininwabiko Lighthouse, located on the shore of Lake Superior, in 1910. Here Willa eagerly waits to catch a glimpse of Halley’s Comet while her husband, Theodulf, fears its passing will rain down poison on the earth.…


  • Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News

    Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Beth Kephart writes about Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story from Tursulowe Press. + Among My Souvenirs:On Researching Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News The box arrived on Thanksgiving Day…


  • Home

    The old man sits at the kitchen table, though it is no longer much of a kitchen. The stove doesn’t work, but that is because he no longer bothers with it. The sink drips slowly into a basin, though only because he has let it. A mouse skitters across the counter, but it is no…


  • Texas: The Great Theft

    Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft is a sprawling novel, immense in scope despite its limited setting on the Texas-Mexico border, in the towns of Brownsville (Brunveille) and Matamoros (Matasanchez). Boullosa sometimes gives the absurd impression that this is a parsimonious narrative. In fact the breadth of life on offer here is immense. The novel…


  • Clinical Labor

    I had to agree not to get pregnant. I told Vick Clover, the recruiter, that I didn’t intend to have sex with anyone any time soon, but that didn’t matter. As “a woman of childbearing potential,” I had to produce a negative hGG serum test to participate in a Phase 1 drug trial. Then, I…