People with Holes is a packed collection of stories, and many of them invoke a kind of magical feminism, one that’s erotic and inventive and violent and complicated and sometimes beautiful. The titular story begins: I found you wearing a hole one day. And while this hole, which straddles both the literal and metaphorical, might…

There’s a certain kind of kid that starts off his teen years with a deck of tarot cards, and adds to it a copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Necronomicon (for sale at the Walden Books at the Auburn Mall), and the writings of Alistair Crowley. I was the kind of kid who was looking to…

Think of the classical mystery genre that is set in a small town and involves the unexpected murder of a prominent citizen. Now think of this genre turned inside out and upside down, where all of your “mystery story” expectations are set up neatly but quickly subverted. This will give you some idea of what…

The stories in Sheldon Lee Compton’s début collection The Same Terrible Storm are a neat fit for their title. Of course, The Same Terrible Storm is also the name of one of the stories in the collection, but each story, especially the longer ones, suit this notion of storm—of rage, outburst, eruption, hurricane, all of…

Allow me to submit, as my review, a revision of the LC Subject Headings originally listed for Gretchen Henderson’s The House Enters the Street. (The genre distinction brouhaha has nothing on the non-existent battle over the Library of Congress’ list of relevant subject categories a book supposedly addresses. The “free floating divisions” end up distilling…

Adam Prince‘s The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men is a complicated collection of short stories. I know I’m supposed to admire a challenge, to dig deep for my empathy when confronting a fictional perpetrator of paedophilia up close and personal, especially if the perp is at all confused or remorseful—or escaping confusion and remorse by…

There is a Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) revival going on in the English-speaking world, and it’s always exciting when an author of relative obscurity suddenly inspires general discussion and becomes available to a larger audience. The notion of “relative obscurity” isn’t quite correct with respect to Lispector, however, except perhaps in the wider, English-speaking world. Lispector,…

Short fiction comes in a breathtaking variety of form and feeling, and each class of short fiction has its own set of strengths and particularities. A particular strength of long-form realistic short fiction is how it can subtly mimic the novel, allowing a twenty-page story to leave the same impression in the memory of the…

In his preface to The White Goddess: An Encounter, before descending into layers of memory, Simon Gough warns that he will not be bound by “precise dates and times,” and that “the narrative itself is far more important than whether or not an event or conversation happened on such-and-such a day.” Such a caveat created…

Prague. Cold rain on black leather jackets. City bridges looming over an icy river. Hard alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, prostitutes, men who look like corpses, men who look at corpses. Decay both physical and psychological. Violence. Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight is an unsettling read, even when held conceptually at a distance with the somehow-softening title…

Bayard Godsave’s Lesser Apocalypses traces the half-lives of disaster—dissipating but never disappearing. This kaleidoscopic collection challenges the idea of catastrophe as an isolated incident, a dot on a timeline. Rather, disaster lays low in the crannies of people’s porous lives, resurfacing every time the sponge is squeezed. Drawing on an older definition of apocalypse, these…

Near the end of the first story in Rebekah Matthews’s short story collection, Hymnal for Dirty Girls, the first person narrator, who is sitting in a car on a fairly bizarre stake-out with a woman she is clearly in love with, has the following thought: …I wonder what your husband is like. I wonder what he…