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…

There are times in our lives when we need some help, a tossed rope to help us through. Often this occurs during adolescence, those years in which we are powerless to radically alter our circumstance and where our sense of perspective has not yet developed. It’s a dangerous period, a time of bad choices and…

Peter Tieryas Liu’s Bald New World displays inventiveness both wild and thorough in its creation of a dystopic future born of the inexplicable but world-changing event of the Great Baldification (twenty-five years before the present action everyone on the planet suddenly and permanently lost their hair). The novel takes us into the heart of a…

In The Poison that Purifies You, Elizabeth Kadetsky offers ten variations on the theme of vulnerability. Since social life provides many opportunities to play on the vulnerabilities of others, the stories in this accomplished collection are densely populated, like the cities in which most of them take place, and touched with a certain skepticism about…

What I’m trying to say is, it’s sad the world is ending, isn’t it? I mean, all the suffering that’s about to happen. All the people—everything they’ve ever done and hope to do will be gone forever. Families are going to be separated—some will go to heaven and some won’t. Plus the sun and the…

“The words I wanted to say were not a prayer,” says 23 year-old Taylor Alta, moments after reciting the Lord’s Prayer in reverence for the striking New England and Mid-Atlantic landscapes that frame Kate Gray’s just-released novel, Carry the Sky, “The words I wanted were about wanting, the opening in the chest, the loneliness.” Gray’s…

Is this the motley underbelly of Ireland? The fated and the maimed? The directionless? Colin Barrett certainly seems to be constructing such a vision of contemporary small-town Ireland in his award-winning Young Skins. I could approach this collection from several directions, but I’ve decided to have a look at it through the character of Arm,…

I had a doll when I was a little boy—apparently. I don’t remember Cindy, but my mother never tires of reminding me how progressive she was in letting me have her: Cindy. The doll. Progressive? Sara Lippmann’s Doll Palace takes a more sardonic view of The Doll as toy, as child substitute, as moniker and as metaphor…