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,…

Anna Mantzaris recently released her first book, Occupations (Galileo Press), a trim collection of stories whose strange charm defies narrative logic. Around each story’s surreal comic streak runs a manic filigree. What feels like playful eccentricity and whimsy on first read, gradually becomes unnerving as things progress. Mantzaris’s first-person narrators appear so composed and clear-spoken,…

Mary Fleming and I first met through a friend, while I was teaching in Paris the spring of 2011. Charlie Trueheart, then director of the American Library in Paris, thought we’d get along and he organized a dinner at a restaurant next to a church near where they both lived. When Mary and I got together next, I met her golden-haired…

“You can not combine memoir with fiction!”: Sylvia Brownrigg in conversation with Sarah Stone about The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found Sylvia Brownrigg, the Northern California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award–winning author of seven works of fiction, is also a critic and book reviewer, including for the New York…