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…

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…