The Book of Happenstance is a novel uninterested in epiphany: murders are left unsolved, relationships, their wounds and their possibilities, remain in that condition, and precious things stolen by thieves are never recovered. Helena Verbloem, the narrator, is a lexicographer assisting a renowned scholar, Theo Verway, on a project to catalog, to rescue, obsolete Afrikaans…

A sudden, brutal and unforgettable immersion, Ayiti explores the intimacies of Haitian life in both Haiti and the United States through short stories, several as concise as a single page. The Artistically Declined Press website aptly describes Ayiti as “a unique blend of fiction, nonfiction and poetry,” apt because it is often difficult to discern…

Love, inarguably one of the most universal human experiences, has come to be an almost taboo theme in serious literature. Love stories are too often sentimental and trite, populated with one-dimensional characters and all too familiar plots. As a result, love stories are often delegated to that most disparaged of genres: romance. Yet as a…

It isn’t easy to publish a love story these days—somehow we’ve all decided this is the stuff of cliché. As if the back and forth success and failure of looking for love doesn’t concern most people most of the time. Which is why Nina-Marie Gardner’s Sherry & Narcotics stands out in its genre of contemporary…

From its very title, 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers seems intent on exploding the notion that our literary age is a literary age made safe and over polished by an overabundance of MFA programs, How-to-Write texts, workshops, and writers’ groups. This emphasis on youth and innovation announces an almost…

The artist statement of sorts, “Fiction”, that begins the first half of the stories in A.D. Jameson’s Amazing Adult Fantasy, teaches us how to read the entire collection: we’re told that we’re reading a book that’s been lost in a fire, that the book we’re reading doesn’t exist. A better metaphor for childhood, the gratuitous…

At the 1893 World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his now-famous thesis about the closing of the frontier, proposing that, American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive…

The photo showed a grizzly on its hind legs, leaning on one of those half-sized school buses, paw inside a window, lips pulled back above those amazing teeth. The article explained that the starving bear had come upon the bus while it idled on the street of a small Alaskan town. The bear shook the…

The day she became queen, there were lots of flowers, lots of noise[s], lots of blood and lots of dead bodies, but she wasn’t particularly surprised. These opening lines of a delightful and amusing first novel by Swiss playwright Robert Pagani set the intimate tone for the story, told essentially by the three main characters…

the stinging fly is an Irish journal of fiction, poetry and critical reviews. As expected, much of the writing gathered here has a distinctly Irish flair—that incredible storytelling, that graceful movement through words and ideas. It is not exclusively Irish, however, neither by theme or by writer. This is a journal that fits easily on…

I am a Very Productive Entrepreneur is a book of “absurdist” (Svalina’s word) business plans. But to call these plans “absurdist” seems to self-deprecate or to shy away from the very real, intense attention to sadness that many of these businesses attempt to alleviate. I started this one business that retrofit memories to include pilot…

Christopher Higgs’ novel, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, is the experimental literature fan’s experimental novel. A novel about the fictional writer, Marvin K. Mooney, as much as it is an overview of the history and nature of experimental writing, Mooney is constructed from essays, reviews, letters, short fiction, creative non-fiction by Mooney (and…