She had this crusty, warm light buzzing around her, insistently telling her what it felt like to be all by your little old lonesome so damn assuming self. This is how author Sarah Gerkensmeyer describes the lonely woman who becomes the third wife of a godless polygamist in the story “Careless Daughters,” but really, it…

Entertaining Strangers opens with a brief Prelude describing a fire which happened seventy-five years before. Both the Prelude, and the novel itself which is set in 1997, are narrated by Jules, who in 1997 seems to be a relatively young woman. So far, so confusing… In the first chapter, Jules sits down for a minute,…

American literature has a tradition of generation novels which stamp what it is like to live in a specific moment in the long continuum of human history. F. Scott Fitzgerald attempted to capture the jazz age with novels such as The Great Gatsby, and Hemingway wrote about the post-World War I ‘Lost Generation’ much as…

English and Creative Writing teacher Kathryn Dow’s first novel The Great Disappointment is, in fact, no disappointment whatsoever. More magic than magic realism, this is a novel of teenage angst and resiliency, a runaway tale, a novel within a novel, and a clear and poignant peek into the world of a Midwestern college English program…

One of the greatest pleasures in the life of a reader is discovering a new artist, one who views life in ways both unique and recognizable. The twenty-three pieces that make up Scott Garson’s new collection are, as individual stories, lovely, but as a whole, they achieve a type of harmony, a song full of…

To choose pieces to include in a short story collection is a challenging task, one that needs a writer with a keen eye for finding common themes without choosing what is essentially the same story, and a keen ear that can hear the rhythm of the sentences and style. In the small press world where…

Myfanwy Collins’s debut story collection is a gargantuan accomplishment, stuffing thirty-seven stories into under two-hundred pages. Many of the pieces found in I Am Holding Your Hand span no more than a few pages, and given the likelihood that readers will digest a handful of stories at a time, it might be best to equate…

Welcome to summer. As I have done in years past when our reviewing year hits its mid-point, I have asked our reviewers to put together some summer reading recommendations for our readers. If there is one thing these past two and a half years as reviews editor have taught me, it’s that there are far…

The first thing that stands out about Casper Kelly’s collection, other than the title, is the Table of Contents, which is actually a humorous flash piece that begins, “Help, I’m Trapped in a Table of Contents.” Kelly continues this quirky tone with an Introduction that questions why anyone would read a short story collection from…

In Mark Maynard’s short story collection Grind, the spotlight is on Reno, Nevada’s surreal underbelly. A pawn shop owner is capable of a kind of psycho-kinetic, emotional transference; a horse-breaking work-release program allows inmates to taste freedom; a mysterious, schizophrenic homeless man wins a multimillion-dollar slot machine payout. The small engraved plastic sign on top…

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. … the demands of economy push writers to polish their sentences to precision and clarity, to bring off their effects with unusual intensity, to remain focussed on the point of their creation and drive it forward with functional single-mindedness, and to end it with…

Most discussions about extinction usually include a list of now mythical animals: the dodo bird, the mammoth, dinosaurs, and others. What if the list instead enumerated defunct professions, lost traditions, ruptured relationships, and insignificant towns and dissolved countries? In his debut story collection Strategies Against Extinction, Michael Nye depicts nostalgia and storytelling as fragile arts…