The concept of cross gender narration isn’t exactly innovative these days, yet when a writer manages to capture something unique in the portrayal of the inner workings of the opposite sex, it’s cause enough to pay attention. Jodi Angel’s latest collection of stories, You Only Get Letters from Jail, is just the sort of work…

Valerie Trueblood’s Search Party is layered and wise. A thoughtful blend of vignettes and stories, these characters are marked by their separateness. They search for what might help them understand. Rescue arrives in unexpected ways. Our lives, these stories suggest, are directed by nothing more than chance and circumstance. We might stumble into a new family, as…

Janice Deal’s newest collection, The Decline of Pigeons, is formulaic—but not in the sense that is so often tossed around when referring to work best left to those who want something to read casually without much thought after finishing. It’s formulaic in that each of her nine stories introduce you to a life that has…

Remember that couple at your high school or college who were always making out in public, who became notorious, perhaps envied, then eventually reviled, for “doing it” a lot more than anyone else? But were they? Or was the truth a lot more complicated than it appeared on the surface? Pamela Erens’s novel The Virgins…

Near the end of The Taste of Marmalade, the main character Katrin says this: ‘You can’t do anything, yet,’ she repeats, nodding, and hears how quickly she has forgotten to live in the first person. ‘You will tell me when you can,’ she adds, but she is really saying, I was wrong. She has been…

Robert Vaughan’s Microtones is a gorgeous chapbook full of lovely little pages, poetry, and flash fiction—flashes of brilliance delivered with full poetic license. Those familiar with Vaughan’s work will know he doesn’t shy away from the heart of a matter. Take the poem “Turbidity,” for instance. It begins simply (and shallowly) enough: Holidays are hard:I’m…

Drowning is horrific. Water fills the lungs, blood flow is cut off as oxygen stops going to the brain, and desperation consumes the victim. The last seconds of his or her life are a hopeless grasp for air. In Justin Lawrence Daugherty’s collection Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise, drowning becomes a parable for the…

In My Beauty, when Danuta catches the attention of millionaire Sven and escapes her troubles as a farm worker, she discovers dueling layers to her new upper-class lifestyle. On the surface, everything is beautiful, rich, clean. Viewed from the warm, comfortable farmhouse, snow “swathe[s] the farm in luxurious folds.” To her former co-workers snow means…

Contemporary audiences, inoculated against splattering brains and shattering lives, know when to peep between their fingers, when to look away. How, then, is a writer to convey horror to an audience inured to horror? What tools can the writer use to shock us out of our complacency? Daphne Gottlieb chooses form. This chapbook consists of…

As a boy Dave Lordan would almost certainly have watched Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock (1983-87) on Irish national television. Like most children’s verse, the show’s theme song has a serious message at its heart. It has to do with the nature of work and responsibility, and it is tempting to suggest that it lodged somewhere…

In her introduction to Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, editor A.J. Ashworth tells us that the anthology came about as a rescue attempt, a way to help save the original Brontë home (in a village called Thornton in West Yorkshire) with the hope of giving it some sort of historical protection.…

Elizabeth Cohen’s short story collection, The Hypothetical Girl, is directly inspired from her experiences in post-divorce dating. The title comes from one story in the collection in which a young woman is told by someone she meets online that she is not a real girl, but a hypothetical girl. In an interview with Burnt Twig…