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…

Jeff Lockwood’s novel Anomie opens with a mini parable about parable-telling. The page-long “prologue” shows Michael, the book’s protagonist, as a young boy, cocooned in his father’s arms and listening to the “story of Gookoosh” (a tale from his father’s Anishinaabe ancestry, an Indian people native to the Great Lakes region). His mother observes the…

Queen of Flowers and Pearls by Gabriella Ghermandi is a coming-of-age novel, an exploration of colonialism and war, and a study of cross-cultural conflict, but at its heart it’s a novel about storytelling. Ghermandi announces this theme in the novel’s opening sentence, spoken by the protagonist Mahlet: “When I was a little girl, I was…

With so much ink spilled over the dramas of boarding schools, it’s hard to imagine a story set at a picturesque institution in rural Massachusetts could possibly feel fresh. And yet, in The Half Brother, Holly LeCraw has created an insular world that explores relationships with people and places in an exciting, insightful way. Her…

Winner of the 2013 Grace Paley Prize, Bewildered collects ten stories that widen the cracks in conventional façades — pleasant neighborliness, self-sacrificing motherhood — to expose what squirms beneath. Though the stories vary in tone, theme, and subject, they’re unified by the author’s gift for the incisive one-liner, the wry observation that illuminates the whole.…

The Secret Games of Words, Karen Stefano’s debut collection of short fiction — and two pieces that at least look like poetry — is an inventory of failures, missteps, disastrous oversights and a roadmap to insanity. But tragedy is counterbalanced by insight, lies by stark-worded honesty. Timelines and causalities play such large roles in these…