Ben Hoffman, winner of both a fiction fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, writes stories that are original, sometimes funny, and often illuminate the dynamics in family relationships that can make the reader feel simultaneously together and apart. His outstanding new chapbook, Together, Apart, is packed with daughters…

The title of Monica McFawn’s debut story collection, Bright Shards of Someplace Else, comes not from the title of one of the eleven stories, but from a character’s thought in one of the many moments of longing found in McFawn’s work. Marti, one of two older women who’ve given their lives over to caring for…

On August 6, 1945, the first nuclear bomb used in war destroyed Hiroshima, followed at Nagasaki three days later by the second. The first was code-named Little Boy, the second Fat Man. From this anthropomorphic nicknaming is born the pivotal conceit of Mike Meginnis’s poetically and morally luminous novel, Fat Man and Little Boy. After…

In Certain Circles was written in 1971, the last novel Elizabeth Harrower would write to date. By then she was the author of four other novels, including The Watch Tower, all very successful and well-received, and Harrower was being likened to Patrick White and Christina Stead. But In Certain Circles was to have a different…

Steve Himmer, editor A catalog of the narrator’s wine-soaked misadventures at readings and lectures by Booker Prize winners, How To Be A Public Author by Paul Ewen (aka Francis Plug), published by Galley Beggar Press, really may be the funniest novel I’ve ever read — it certainly drew me some concerned looks from my fellow…

Adrian Nathan West Leavetaking by Peter Weiss, tr. Christopher Levinson (Melville House) Peter Weiss has been the most important prose discovery for me this year. A figure of extraordinary individual integrity, Weiss inquires as to the nature of his being and his relation to the transitoriness of life with a lack of ostentation almost inconceivable…

Henry Marten is an American abroad, ten years married to his wife Stephanie, and in love with the “circus” that is his adopted city, Prague. A rare bookseller, one of Henry’s many charms is his ability to wax poetic about, for example, a first edition copy of To the Lighthouse: I don’t want to be…

Large cities have the odd feature of being collections of smaller localities – neighborhoods – that are often composed of immigrants whose histories and affiliations are tied to distant cultures settled deeply in distant regions. A Londoner could be from Golders Green but have a culture and heart rooted in Poland, Greece, Turkey, or Israel.…

It takes me a couple of pages to figure out that the narrator of Coyote is female. What not to do before you start reading this story: Google Colin Winnette. You’ll have trouble getting the beardy guy out of your head. The narrator of Coyote is a woman. No beard. Though this becomes obvious within…

Taylor Brown hails from the south, and if a reader happened to miss such a fact in his bio, the stories in his debut collection will undoubtedly confirm such a geographic connection. And while at times In the Season of Blood and Gold may seem to tread in the familiarities of Southern Literature, Brown isn’t…

In her debut short story collection, Alden Jones offers a frank glimpse at the country club youth lost to the economic privilege of contemporary America. With the exception of the Costa Rican hotel worker in her story “Sin Alley,” Jones’s central characters are products of middle class to wealthy upbringings from suburban environments along the…

In his latest collection, Come By Here, stories and a novella, Tom Noyes hints at a nearing apocalypse. The end of the world is most literal in the titular novella, set in a landscape burning with coal seam fires. We see these fires from multiple perspectives—from Sensenig, who owns the problematic mines, to Philip and…