The Mere Weight of Words is a heavy examination of difficult relationships. The first person narrator is a young woman named Meredith whose passion is language, something she uses as both a shield and as a sword. Her estranged father is in the film industry, something she seems to roll her eyes at throughout the…

All of life is a complex interplay between the contemplative and the corporeal. Our experience of our bodies—how they make us feel, whether they define us, the extent to which we seek to control our own and those of others—forms the backbone of In the Body, a provocative new collection of short stories and a…

This volume of 200 or so pages is a delight from beginning to end. Beginning with an author’s note and ending with the title story—a climax of all that a non-initiate thinks of as Japanese exoticism. Of the 13 stories, 12 have already been published in a wide variety of journals—“often in very different versions”…

There’s a reason childhood and adolescence are often referred to as formative years. Kids are impressionable. Their brains are like underground caverns waiting to be made into landfills for knowledge. They absorb and learn from everything around them, for better or for worse. That capacity for learning is perhaps matched only by vulnerability, a dangerous…

I first came across Chad Simpson’s writing at The Rumpus. An Epilogue to the Unread is told in such a straightforward manner that when I reached its end, my own sobs surprised me. I hadn’t even realized I had started crying; my empathy had transformed into something so personally felt I had almost unconsciously disappeared into my own…

Folk tales and fairytales have always fascinated me—where do they begin within a culture, how do they become “fixed” into a particular structure and telling, and then, sometimes more importantly, how do they resonate across the years and into new temporal contexts. Folk tales are often some of the earliest examples of a culture’s “literature”…

In his essay Database As A Symbolic Form, Lev Manovich writes, As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of…

You, too, can turn trouble around and become a small god. So says the fictional science (31). Amber Sparks does not write science fiction; rather, she writes inventively about the truths of our world in a style that often parallels humor with sadness, death with life, and optimism with doubt. The thirty stories comprising her…

One of the defining elements of Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction project is the impossibility of gathering these assorted fictions under a single stylistic or thematic roof. And the most recent offering—the fourth of the series and the last edited by Aleksandar Hemon—is no different; the Best European Fiction 2013 is a mix of aesthetics and styles,…

The pathos of failure and seductive delusions of grandeur are at the core of Joseph Avski’s novel Heart of Scorpio. Set in modern day Colombia, the story is a fictionalized narrative of Kid Pambelé’s reign in the 1970s as Colombia’s junior welterweight boxing champion. In Avski’s novel, the protagonist Milton Olivella is a famed boxer,…

The disparate pieces that make up Berit Ellingsen’s new anthology Beneath the Liquid Skin seem to bear little relation to one another. This collection of flash fiction, prose poems, short observations, fragments of tales and a few more fully developed stories has been drawn together from pieces that have appeared in various online journals. Length…

Very short fiction is a versatile medium—it often functions like a poem, creating an impressionistic and exploded universe of a specific emotion, thought or interaction; just as often, a piece of flash comprises a single, distinct microstory, meant to represent a larger or universal experience. It can also work, and often does, in combination with…