Readers of the first collection of stories by David Appleby will already be familiar with “Moon Alley”, the poor neighbourhood of Philadelphia, with McFadden’s Saloon and the elevated railway, “an environment of abandonment“ (160). Half of the 14 stories in this new collection take place there too, detailing the impoverished lives of descendants of Irish…

Two words on this satirical novel: wild ride. The opening lines show what Warner does throughout the novel. I was playing footsie under the restaurant table with my girlfriend Lyllyan, while her father, Cal, tried to persuade me all kindergarteners should be trained in the use of handguns. Do Americans talk so loudly because they’re…

Flash fiction sits on a continuum between poetry and traditional narrative. Its only defining characteristic is its brevity. With no real minimum word count and a maximum hovering somewhere around 1000 words, flash fiction is about eliciting an instantaneous connection, a reaction, between the reader and an idea or image or feeling contained in each…

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.…