Beacons is a refreshingly earnest anthology of short fiction commissioned for the dual purposes of raising funds for the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition and telling the stories that may motivate human civilization to act on behalf of our planet. No short order, and certainly one that begs the question: what can stories do to combat…

In 2011, 450 novellas from 34 different countries were entered for the first Paris Literary Prize created by the legendary Shakespeare & Company bookshop and the de Groot Foundation. Grey Cats, set in Paris where its author lives, was one of two runners-up. I must confess to bias at the outset: Paris is a city…

The fourth line of “The Water Cycle,” the ninth story in Anne Valente’s slender collection, An Elegy for Mathematics, reads: But sometimes it made me feel strange, for reasons I can’t explain, to think that maybe you knew we had separate lives in some way, and that sometimes we did things that weren’t always the…

Steven Schwartz’s latest story collection is an aptly titled one. The souls occupying the pages of the eleven stories in Little Raw Souls feel a little uncooked, a little incomplete—but by no means should this be taken as a disparaging comment. The rawness implied in the title not only germinates in the imperfections of the…

NB – Full disclosure: I have a short piece in “The Wife” issue of Spolia that was published last week. However, that piece was commissioned and published after I read these first two issues and after this review was written. This past spring Bookslut launched its sister publication, Spolia, a literary journal publishing monthly themed…

This debut finds itself suspended between reality and perception. Why We Never Talk About Sugar is a collection equal parts science and superstition, an experiment with fact and fabrication that constitutes a sensory literary formula. Through the collision of what we know and what we believe, a magnetic energy is released. In the hands of…

Two-way propositions: in the first example, the prepositional phrase describes a destination. In the second, it describes a location. German indicates this distinction through the use of cases (Wohin/where to? Wo/ Where at?) These are the opening lines of Joanna Walsh’s chapbook, Hauptbahnhof, published this summer by 3:AM Press. It is a woman’s soliloquy, seemingly…

If Thor Garcia’s Only Fools Die of Heartbreak, his latest short fiction collection, had somehow been published in the 19th Century, it would have given Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn a run for their money as the most controversial and banned book in the nation. Even as recently as the 1960’s, the book would have undoubtedly…

We’ve seen our share of unlikable narrators, but Christiana Spens’s Adrian, a high-up politician with a taste for sex and money, is something special. Death of a Ladies’ Man, a darkly humorous novella, first serialized on the 3 A.M. Magazine website and then published by its press, follows Adrian and his family members’ lives through…

Divine intervention is hardly a blessing for Lilah and Sam in Amanda Leduc’s The Miracles of Ordinary Men, and a belief in uplifting, heavenly intercessions is but one of the expectations that Leduc bucks in this ambitious novel. Questioning our wants is not simply a thematic concern in the novel, but one that manifests itself…

Gabe Durham’s Fun Camp tours readers through the confusion and passion of youth over the course of one week spent at a summer camp dedicated to encouraging its visitors to become new fun creatures free from the bonds of who they were before. Bad behavior is valued in the proper context set down by the camp, although…

Given that the story is named after and relies on the features of something that seems like a myth, a soldier bear named Wojtek, Bernie Hafeli’s Bear Season is bound to be gloriously odd. Part of its oddity comes from a difficulty to situate the story; Bear Season happens at the boundaries between Poland and…