In John Lane’s latest book, Fate Moreland’s Widow, small mill town politics in the 1930s are explored through the lens of one localized tragedy. Carlton, South Carolina, becomes a hotbed of union action when the local mill boss targets workers shortly before being involved in a shadowy and mysterious accident. Privilege, politics in a changing…

Lynn Sloan’s debut novel Principles of Navigation explores the uncertain terrain of marriage through the eyes of Alice Becotte, a newspaper reporter. Alice lives in Haslett, a small town in Indiana, a town that she settles in with her husband Rolly when he lands a tenure-track job in the art department at a small local…

Equal parts rumination on starting over in middle age, a love song to Copenhagen, the tale of a man belatedly growing up, and a mystery story, Beneath the Neon Egg, the final installment in Thomas E. Kennedy’s Copenhagen Quartet, follows its Irish-American protagonist, Patrick Bluett, through the course of a winter in Copenhagen as he…

When I was a kid, I loved reading scripts for plays. I loved reading detailed scene expositions and character descriptions. I loved the hints for how to read a line. Slowly. Abruptly. Whispering. With warmth. With fear. With apprehension. An aside. An interruption. An insinuation. I loved these parenthetically contained words, these descriptive little ghosts…

In her debut collection of stories, Wendy J. Fox raises the bar for what the short form can achieve. Her stories are crafted jewels: elegant, glittering, cutting. She has a poet’s eye for detail, but the voice of a storyteller. The Seven Stages of Anger contains eleven stories, and Fox is equally adept describing the…

While reading the story “Face” from Darrin Doyle’s The Dark Will End The Dark I was reminded of the ache in my wrist. I’ve had this dull pain there for over a week and I told myself I’d go to the doctor if it didn’t go away, only I can’t remember when the pain started.…

Short fiction writer Matt Rowan’s second book, Big Venerable, collects seven stories, all of which center around seemingly mundane events. But these stories are far from mundane. Rather, Big Venerable is like stepping into a Salvador Dali painting: it appears to be the real world, yet there are things that are off-kilter, or stretched, and…

Explosions await in the stories of Nick Ripatrazone’s collection Ember Days. In the novella that gives its name to the book, set in 1975 New Mexico near the White Sands Missile Range, the main characters are still caught in a metaphorical blast zone where atomic bomb testing took place thirty years earlier. Blake helped to…

Lance Olsen’s novel Theories of Forgetting takes the reader on a journey through illness, memory, time, and the form of the printed book. Olsen teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah, and he has said that Theories of Forgetting was inspired by the Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork constructed in…

In her collection of novellas, Could You Be with Her Now, Jen Michalski showcased an incredible range in only two stories, capturing the voice of a mentally-challenged teenage boy and delicately portraying the joy and heartbreak of a relationship between two women of drastically different ages. Much like these novellas and her novel, The Tide…

Sheldon Lee Compton’s particular approach to Appalachia and its denizens is one of jagged rawness that exposes the open heart of America to the reader. His first collection, The Same Terrible Storm, was one of the standout collections of short fiction a few years back, and his current collection, Where Alligators Sleep, is a fine…

The narrators of Cyn Vargas’s stories tell quiet, deceptively simple accounts of loss, family mysteries, and their earned understanding of their experiences. The stories in On the Way are simple in language and prose style and complex in their emotional freight. In some of the stories that these girl-narrators tell (the narrators are almost all…