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…

Last week I attended the annual Revere Beach Sand Sculpting Festival, where masterpieces of sand and glue towered above spectators, rivaling the beauty and intricacies of a more permanent medium like stone. As I stood there admiring art whose destruction predates creation, I came to the slow realization that I was looking at a visual…

Many years ago, I was obsessed with a show called Sliders. It starred Jerry O’Connell (before he went all Stamos on us) as Quinn Mallory, a genius graduate student who discovered a way to travel between parallel worlds. What tethered me to my television each week was not the pedestrian dialogue or questionable visual effects,…

The stories in Rae Bryant’s collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals possess a certainty of voice and spirit that contradicts the volatile, undefined nature of the title. Bryant’s language is as lyrical as her subject matter is corporal. Her protagonists are largely (but not entirely) women who are struggling to relate to a man,…

The eight stories in Patrick Michael Finn’s collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, are so thematically and stylistically cohesive they create a story collection that reads very much like a novel. These are not linked stories, not in the traditional sense; they do not share characters or even strict time periods. But they…

I’m nervous to talk about Vi Khi Nao’s The Vanishing Point of Desire. I feel self-conscious, like I need to protect my ideas from your derision, like I need to couch my reading experience through “I” in the event that I am totally, uselessly, wrong about everything you are about to read. Maybe this is…

Child narrators can be some of the most interesting narrators in fiction, in the sense that they are able to reflect and refract adult situations without completely understanding what is really going on. They have both a developing awareness, which makes them pay close attention to difficult situations, and an emergent morality, which means they…

In the opening story of Stacey Levine’s The Girl With Brown Fur, a family is moving to Uppsala. It’s a real word and a real place, yet it’s one that sounds strange and slightly fantastic to an Anglophone ear. Suspending her readers between the familiar and the foreign is what Levine does best, and each…

Meg Tuite’s new novel, Domestic Apparition, describes the life of a young woman named Michelle who navigates the mean streets, and meaner Catholic schools and dysfunctional homes, of a working-class American childhood. Michelle idolizes her intelligent but troubled older sister, survives the abusive rage of her father and the nuns who teach at her school,…

Beware! Things are not what they seem in Christopher Boucher’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, out this summer from Melville House. Within the pages of this quirky yet delightfully thoughtful novel, we have a Volkswagen that is not only a car but the narrator’s son, we have Trees that steal hearts, ovens that striptease,…

For many, summer is a time of loosened schedules, and, for the first time in maybe a year, the luxury of spare hours. The extra minutes of sunlight call us to step outside into a garden, onto a balcony or porch, even a bench in a park…wherever, but we find these secret or not-so-secret spots…