Apology
In its most potent forms, guilt can have a lasting and powerful hold on us, sometimes altering the course of our lives. Apology, Jon Pineda’s début novel, offers a heartfelt study of these effects, and...
View ArticleBeautiful Garbage
In this unflinching and perceptive début novel, Jill Di Donato describes one young sculptor’s struggle to rise above the din of the 1980s art world and to discover her true voice. In the process, she...
View ArticleLittle Raw Souls: Stories
Good short stories drop us into the middle of situations we can’t help but find riveting, no matter how strange or uncomfortable they may be. Steven Schwartz’s latest collection, Little Raw Souls, is...
View ArticleInterview with Ron MacLean, author of Headlong
Ron MacLean’s Headlong, published earlier this month by Last Light Studio, did for me what the best novels do: It pulled me wholly into its world while I was reading it and burned like a steady flame...
View ArticleSkating on the Vertical
Many of the tales in Jan English Leary’s profound, heartfelt story collection, Skating on the Vertical, center on characters who have reached pivotal points in their lives and are trying to figure out...
View ArticleKingdom of Women
Because of his wealth and power, a serial rapist repeatedly escapes the consequences of his actions. A man beats his wife severely but is somehow found not to have committed a crime. A young man...
View ArticleSecond Story Man
The most enthralling competitions involve equally talented opponents who have something to prove, ideally a something that runs deeper than the game at hand. In his gripping novel Second Story Man,...
View ArticleEvery Day There Is Something About Elephants
Timothy Gager’s captivating new collection of flash fiction, Every Day There Is Something About Elephants, immerses us in revelatory episodes or situations from a range of lives. All the stories, even...
View ArticleTonic and Balm
This entertaining and deeply affecting novel-in-stories, set in 1919, immerses us in the lives and travails of various members of Doc Bell’s Miracles and Mirth Medicine Show, a traveling ensemble of...
View ArticleTo the Bones
Some of my favorite novels are those in which the setting is integral to the story. In Valerie Nieman’s thrilling, genre-bending novel To the Bones, the richly rendered setting is inseparable from...
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