The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock is a sobering exploration into the bleakest regions of the Earth and the heart alike. The novel takes place in the Cold War Era, and the space race is in full force. America needs to respond to and exceed the success of Russia’s Sputnik: the satellite which not only…

The opening of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth is intriguing: “I’m the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I’m a discreet sort of man.” Most of the novel is narrated by Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, better known as Highway. Later portions are narrated by Jacobo de Voragine, Highway’s “dental…

My Father is an Angry Storm Cloud is a curious collection of tales. Taken as a whole, the stories present themselves as a loose coalition of rivals vying for the title of standout. Fortunately, there is some competition for this spot, and through her broad stylistic range, Melissa Reddish turns the predictable on its head…

The culmination of nine years of writing, The New York Stories is an unusual collection in a number of ways. Set around the small, rural-New York town of Two Rivers, these stories appeared in three previously published volumes — Repetition Patterns, So Different Now, and After the Flood — and are gathered here for the…

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…