Tracks in the snow may deposit no permanent evidence in the fossil record, but it’s another matter in fiction and poetry, where every impression remains. In her poem “Birds in Snow,” H.D. tracks the pronged marks of bird talons through the frost, concluding that “the tracery written here / proclaims what’s left unsaid.” Wendy J.…

Confinement in plain sight is a process of breaking a thing apart and watching it die. The panopticon of sexism and male gaze riots in Aimee Parkison and Carol Guess’s book, Girl Zoo. But it is beyond mere seeing, it’s the speculative bending reality, it’s the text becoming its own confinement. The book is split…

A “wolf tone,” we’re informed on the first page of Christy Stillwell’s debut novel of the same name, “is a wobbling or stuttering pitch caused by the vibration of the bowed instrument’s string in competition with the vibration of its body.” Musicians and music lovers overwhelmingly reject the sound as “annoying,” “hideous,” or monstrous,” a…

In this richly textured debut, Fayeza Hasanat details the suffering and marginalization in Bangladeshi society, both in Bangladesh and in the US. The Bird Catcher and Other Stories contains multi-layered stories dealing with sexism, racism, xenophobia, and the struggles of forging a new identity from a multitude of cultural influences. These are not popcorn pieces:…

A speculative future formed the backdrop of The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker’s widely acclaimed first novel in 2012. The main character in that work is a twelve year old girl whose coming of age story is told in the context of a global disaster that puzzles the scientific community. In her newest novel…

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,…