Reviewers (myself included) sometimes have a compulsion to make connections between short stories in a collection—to build similarities where there are none. As if we can’t let the stories be; they have to be part of something bigger. As if the fact they are contained within the same binding suggests they can’t not be bound…

Everyone knows that “adulthood” doesn’t magically become a reality on a person’s 18th birthday, despite the instant legal right to claim the term “adult.” Instead, adulthood comes upon a person in incremental bouts of awareness and experience. There are obviously marker-events that provide good hints—sexual maturity, high school and college graduation, first jobs, marriage, children,…

It isn’t everyday a book offers two very different ways of reading. The first: intensely personal, sometimes bewildering and yet rigorously demanding in terms of creative participation, and the second: intellectual, research-based and analytical, but also a call to a communal multi-genre artistic experience. These two different methods are on offer in Kristine Ong Muslim’s…

After a trip to the grocery store, one of several in the course of a novel as realistically quotidian as any one of our lives, Kjersti A. Skomsvold’s elderly protagonist Mathea reflects, The bags are heavy and that’s a good thing, I’m sore after my night’s work, I like being sore, it tells me I’ve…

At first I thought it was a celestial accident that Publisher’s Weekly reviewed Manuela Draeger’s In The Time of the Blue Ball as a children’s book, recommended for readers 12 & up. Because I take perverse pride in being, at least when I initially approach a text, an old-school New Critical gal, I didn’t know…

Animals like bats and dolphins echolocate because it is an effective tool for navigation in a low-visibility environment, in darkness or troubled water, for example. In the simplest terms, to echolocate is to shout two simple questions, “Where are you? Where am I?” and then wait for an answer. The answer comes as an altered…

Nick Sweeney’s novel Laikonik Express is named after a long-distance train that runs between Krakow and Gdynia in Poland but we do not meet this “central character” until the narrator, Nolan Kennedy, has already travelled from Istanbul, where he lives, to Warsaw. Kennedy has found an abandoned typescript by his friend Don Darius when the…

The line between childhood and adulthood is rarely as sharp and defined as we expect. As children we believed being an adult entailed more than having spent a certain number of years on the Earth; there must be something, some intangible magic that turns each child into someone different: the adult version of him or…

So I was reading Jessica Westhead’s short story “Coconut,” from her collection And Also Sharks, and I sort of lost myself and laughed out loud and laughed out loud until the guy next to me asked me what I was reading. So I explained, “Well, there’s this woman who starts shoplifting, stealing all these things.…

Douglas Myles worked in a library before becoming a professional mimic. And if Myles had been a real person instead of a made-up character, he would have been tempted to shelve The Mimic’s Own Voice by Tom Williams in the PN2285’s (the comedic studies section), instead of the PS3623’s (American contemporary fiction), because the novella…

The title of Thomas P. Balázs’s nine-story collection, Omicron Ceti III, invites the reader to think about the book in terms of an original Star Trek episode entitled “This Side of Paradise.” Like most of those original Star Trek stories, “This Side of Paradise” is a classic query-story with a moral, asking viewers to think…

This engaging trio of stories by Brown undergrad/Iowa MFA writer Madeline McDonnell are deceptively rewarding. Although they are not three parts of a greater whole, they are related in their themes, by certain metaphors and constraints, and by their accomplished style. Shot through with humor, each seemingly simple story proves, by contrast, its true depth. Madeline McDonnell…