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…

At just under 250 pages, Rainey Royal is an intense and at times disturbing story about a girl growing up in New York during the 1970s and ’80s. Her father, a famous jazz musician, allows his groupies the run of their brownstone, leaving Rainey constantly fighting for privacy and some degree of normalcy. Casual sex…

Beautiful Soon Enough is a slim collection of twenty-three stories, some as short as two pages, others somewhat longer, each a jewel in its own right, set to perfection in relation to the whole, and subtly accompanied by photographs and photo montages done by the author. As various as Margo Berdeshevsky’s characters are in age,…

Shane Jones’s Crystal Eaters is a massive landscape painting of another world, which halfway through completion is dumped over with a bucket of hot water, leaving the particles to run. The village Jones creates is threatened with displacement by the city which will replace it. At the end, they are running up the canvas to:…

According to Cassandra Troyan’s latest poetry collection Blacken Me Blacken Me, Growled, every loving caress carries a hidden violence, a barely suppressed animal rage. A Chicago artist and curator of a popular city performance series, Troyan is no stranger to visceral writing that makes readers squirm, which her latest book more than proves. Given the…

Kerry ‘Kit’ Howley attended her first cage fight by accident. Fleeing a philosophy conference she opened a door marked, “Midwest Cage Championship”and entered the world of the Mixed Martial Arts. Through a six-foot chain-link fence Howley watched a fighter called Sean Huffman, …play fat slobberknocker to another man’s catlike technical prowess…there was not a single…