Set in the mountains and foothills east of Los Angeles, “Falling,” the lead story of its namesake collection, interweaves threads of human failing and falling with those of an earnestly described natural world threatened, perhaps inescapably, by wildfire and encroaching civilization. Juan’s climb and ultimate fall, though recounted in bits and pieces, some of them…

Like a master painter, Josip Novakovich sets his skillful new collection, Honey in the Carcase, against a shifting background of conflict — home and the family, war and displacement, love and betrayal. The stories are at times morose and bitter, and at other times, playful and joyful, experimenting with voice and perspective as much as…

When an author’s novel gets picked up by a reputable publisher, we can assume the manuscript has literary merit and that the story’s premise will hook a wide audience of readers. But as the book is fiction, and as bringing a story from raw manuscript to readers’ shelves takes months on end, we can never…

Molly Gaudry’s Desire: A Haunting connects the fairy tale realm to the real world and blends the two entities, so that reality becomes fantastical and the magical world becomes believable. Told through the first person point of view, the unnamed narrator tells us of the history of her life with such characters as Ogie, Zepha,…

“My journey to parallel realities, a secret laboratory hidden beneath the red mountain of New Mexico, and even the end of the world itself began with a lonely glass of bourbon in the saddest bar in Indianapolis.” The opening of Salvatore Pane’s sophomore novel, The Theory of Almost Everything gives a sample of what you…

At its essence, James R. Gapinski’s Messiah Tortoise is a brief, yet intriguing collection of absurd narratives that take place in zoo settings populated with a diverse array of animals and zoo staff. With each quick story in this colorful menagerie, Gapinski captures readers with his knack for unusual points-of-view, startling predicaments, and unique detail.…

Sherrie Flick’s latest literary offering, Thank Your Lucky Stars, is a collection of fifty short stories with lengths varying from a paragraph of flash fiction to a short story of twenty-one pages. Each is littered with her keen, often touching, observations on relationships and the suburban midwest settings. There are four sections to the book,…

The stories in Renee Simms’ debut collection Meet Behind Mars don’t take place on another planet. They aren’t magical realism, or science fiction, or supernatural. Instead they center on Black women who are on their own frontiers — and only one of them involves the actual atmosphere. That story is “Rebel Airplanes,” in which a…

The characters running through the seventeen stories that make up White Dancing Elephants, Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut collection, often find themselves picking up the pieces. They must deal with the consequences of others’ actions, or of their own. The author embraces the POVs of characters from varying, and sometimes overlapping, backgrounds in order to dive headfirst…

At the first glance, Uncommon Miracles is surely a somewhat tautological title. This impression, however, diminishes as one progresses through the collection. We are introduced to worlds casually populated by ghosts, benevolent and not-so-benevolent spirits, magic, travel in time and across dimensions. In such worlds, it is the quiet, often understated, moments of human drama…

Book discovery is a mysterious thing. In 2018, book lovers have Goodreads, Booktube and Bookstagram; overflowing waves of colorful spines in bookstores; the funky algorithms of Amazon; the vast deep well of literary journals and plethora of publishers small and large; the surprisingly literary world of Twitter. The books of the world can blur together…

Writing a review of Christopher Allen’s new book of flash fiction isn’t easy. There is no problem reading the stories and enjoying them, but what should be said about these tiny, remarkable pieces? They are consistently unlike any other stories I’ve read. Allen has two clear gifts as a writer: imagination and intelligence. There are…