The only certainty in life is that death not only comes for us all, but it also comes for those we love. Grief is to be expected, yet our sorrows are often private affairs. Sometimes we lead ourselves out of the darkness. Sometimes the darkness swallows us. And sometimes we stumble upon a brother or…

Debbie Urbanski doesn’t want to be interviewed. That’s the first thing I notice when we ask Google to record and transcribe our conversation on a Wednesday afternoon in March. After the release of her first book, After World — a novel she began working on during the Obama administration, but did not release until after…

If you’re not already familiar with Josh Denslow, you should be. Denslow, author of the story collection Not Everyone is Special and the novel Super Normal, is a gifted chronicler of character-centered fiction that straddles the line between reality and fantasy.  You might find a unicorn in one of his stories, but the unicorn is…

Anu Kandikuppa’s debut story collection, The Confines (Veliz Books, 2025) takes a grimly absurd look at marriage, reimagining love, attraction, and the social conventions that bind human beings. In stories set in India and the United States, eccentric characters struggle to express themselves—through binge eating, hypochondria, yelling at a corpse, and even through bird poop. They…

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…

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…

Miles Harvey’s debut collection The Registry of Forgotten Objects (Mad Creek Books, 2024)looks at the stories of the objects in our lives, how they change meanings, and tie the past to the present in new ways as they drift between and among people’s lives. Each of these stories explore how objects evoke strange and interesting…

Over the course of four books – culminating in her stunning new novel, Dancing Woman (Blair Publishing) – Elaine Neil Orr links the American South to West Africa with her lyrical and transporting prose. Raised in Nigeria by Baptist medical missionaries, Elaine spent her college years in the U.S., receiving her Ph.D. from Emory University,…

Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Mary Troy recently released her sixth book, In the Sky Lord, a collection of ten stories that slice open the beating heart of the Midwest to reveal a world in which characters work to understand the paradox of modern community. In language that sings with both compassion and…

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…

I first came across Sarah Freligh and her work through her poem “Wondrous,” which was first published in The Sun and then seemed to appear everywhere at once. A line from this gorgeous poem, in which the speaker remembers her mother reading Charlotte’s Web, became the title of her 2015 poetry collection, Sad Math: “my…

In The Road from Belhaven (Knopf) by Margot Livesey one gets lost in the quiet beauty of the 19th century Scottish countryside. Lizzie Craig, raised by her grandparents, knows that she has the gift of second sight from the moment that her first glimpse of the future comes into fruition. A blessing and a curse,…