Jonas T. Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale is set up less as a narrative of linear events (although this is more or less its structure) and more as a series of questions—each with an increasing challenge—offered to the reader. The narrator, who is a six-year-old boy when the book opens, is not the kind of narrator…

Through a journey that minutely, carefully, and assuredly tears at the sinews of reality, David Hartley’s 13-piece flash fiction collection Threshold transports the reader into an eerily strange landscape. Occasionally darkly hilarious, frequently sinister, always poignant, the stories act as brief but beautifully descriptive tourist postcards to a neighbor’s garden, outer space, alternative worlds, and…

Mason Radkoff’s sometimes luminous debut novel, The Heart of June, recounts a late-bloomer’s coming of age. Walt Farnham, a grad school dropout in his mid-forties who lives in an apartment above his ex-wife’s garage, supports himself by half-assedly doing renovations and carpentry in a historic section of Pittsburgh. Readers meet Walt at an awkward moment…

When does one grow up? Do the achieved milestones of an adult life equal maturity? In Conquistador of the Useless Joshua Isard gives us Nathan Wavelsky, a man in his early thirties. He has a decent, if unfulfilling, job. He’s not particularly motivated, and he possesses no driving passions beyond reading, listening to music, and…

Read enough Southern Literature and you’re bound to recognize more than a few of the trademarks of the genre. Read enough of the hackneyed, contrived version of Southern Literature and you’re bound to be introduced to a clichéd and derivative rendering of the genre, one that milks every chance to wring a little more out…

Despite its brevity (86 pages), Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss’s The Desert Places should be mulled over slowly, deliberately, and preferably, if one is squeamish, in well-lit places, for this hybrid text of lyrical rhapsodies, interrogatives, lists, Q&As, omniscient pronouncements, lexicographic glossaries, lush vignettes, and gruesome full-color Matt Kish illustrations is an extended meditation on…

A pair of twins and their friends ogle beach parties from the safety of a balcony while watching the twins’ mother dance away the nights; the girls envy the mother’s freedom, yet they do not understand the danger she courts each night. A young woman tries her hand at social networking, but fears the man…

In Joaquín Pérez Azaústre’s The Swimmers, a separation from his wife and stalling career send protagonist Jonás Ager into a kind of tense disconnect from his world and so he takes solace in swimming; this is not a Zen process or other spiritual journey but a connection between body and mind that he cannot find out of…

Kyle Minor’s Praying Drunk has been building steam for months, ever since its publication announcement in 2013. Minor’s previous collection, In the Devil’s Territory, (2008) was, like this new one, challenging, but not in the sense of experimental or perplexing: his work includes a variety of times, shifts, and psychologies. Praying Drunk moves from the…

Stevan Allred’s stunner of a debut novel is a complex portrait of small-town life. Narrators vary in these fifteen interconnected stories, and this is part of the beauty of this book. The tone is set by the composite voices, which, despite variations in social class, remains consistent. For instance, we encounter Volpe, the man with…

I warn you, I’m a sensitive man, at the mercy of whims and fancy. John Henry Fleming’s first short story collection is a colorful gathering of misfits and metaphysical battles. In Fleming’s opening story “The Cloud Reader,” the title character is a clairvoyant outcast struggling against a fearful, conservative society. The cloud reader, in the…

A failed soccer wunderkind, an anguished mother, and a love-thwarted bar owner are the central figures of the three longish narratives that make up Elisa Ruotolo’s splendid collection, I Stole the Rain. Lengthy though the stories might be, it matters little, as by the end of the book one feels as if a lifetime in stories has…