To write is to be isolated, or so goes the prevailing wisdom. Despite the feedback from teachers and peers; despite the conferences, workshops, and retreats with their offerings of solidarity and commiseration; despite the author/editor relationships without which many wonderful books would not exist — deep down, most of us recognize that most of the…

Prose poem, flash fiction, micro-fiction fragments, segmented miniaturist vignettes; whatever the label, the undergirding question of definition and categorization is: Can it survive in readers’ minds? Can it carve out space in literary memory, attain posterity, and become that thing people talk about when they allude to “pitch perfect” or “encapsulate” or “a portrait of…

Two young boys find a handgun in the woods, a fact that forever changes their lives. One of them, decades later, will take his own life. The other, who long ago had moved away from their hometown, will return to speak at the memorial service honoring Brownie, his childhood friend, in the “old crappy mill…

Millions of undocumented immigrants entered the U.S. as children. Known as “dreamers,” they are a largely hidden and often forgotten population. In the evening news, the dreamers’ collective story is frequently politicized, leaving a blind spot for the general public. Unless one knows someone in a dreamer’s situation, it can be difficult to understand the…

In a recent interview with the Women’s National Book Association, Ellen Prentiss Campbell referred to her new short story collection, Known by Heart, as “love stories in a minor key.” It’s a surprising description for stories in which a pregnant teenage girl is stalked by her angry father and the headmistress of a Quaker high…

The 1960s were a time of great change for Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. Having gained independence from the British in 1948, the country was still gripped by internal power struggles. It was going through the growing pains of any new nation as it comes to terms with how it should exist in the…

Novelist Jill McCroskey Coupe is fascinated by unconventional relationships. In her 2016 debut novel, True Stories at the Smoky View, she writes about an unlikely friendship between an older woman and a ten-year-old child, both of whom are struggling to come to terms with death and abandonment. Beginning with Cannonballs, McCroskey Coupe’s second novel, revisits…

The statistics are horrifying: worldwide, one in three women experience gender-based violence during their lifetimes; 58% of the 87,000 women murdered around the world in 2017 were killed by intimate partners or family members; in the United States alone, at least twenty-six transgender people were killed in 2019, of which 91% were black women. There…

The two beings looked exactly like the spirit creatures I had seen in folktale books — they had human bodies, red faces with long noses, and wings. You mean tengu? Sensei asked. Yes, these were tengu, I replied. Their faces were beautiful shades of red, just as depicted in books. So runs Hiromi Kawakami’s Parade,…

Jason Brown’s A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed is a linked story collection about families, storytelling, and how the two combine. It gives the history of the once-eminent Howland family, whose hold on their legacy and land on the Maine coast slips over the course of decades. The stories cycle through…

I read Hilary Leichter’s debut novel Temporary when I am twenty-one and looking for a job post-graduation. Indeed.com is my top searched website as well as my most-loathed enemy. When I type in keywords like “writing” and “social media” and “graphics” and “Chicago,” the ARC of Temporary winks at me. I glare back and ignore…

For many Americans, the fall of the Soviet Union in December of 1991 has faded into history. It is of the past, removed, something that makes for good television. At most, it is an event of international importance, something that happened “over there.” This is less true for Americans who were born in the USSR…