Andrew Romanelli: Echo Bay defies simple categorization because of the many perspectives it provides. We peruse casino walls filled with polaroids of folks who have been 86’s witness, a suburban marriage dissolve as a U-Haul “swallows the evidence,” and cruise … Continued
(Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018) Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph revolutionized communication in 1844. Yet we are now living in a world where messages are travelling faster than the click of … Continued
(New Jersey: Serving House Books 2016) Paris, Etc. is an exquisite and elegant collection of poems, stories, and essays has the city of lights as its muse – and for most of the authors, it is a muse they romanticize as … Continued
Translated from the Danish by Gaye Kynoch (Rochester, NY: Open Letter Books, 2018) Early in The Endless Summer, the narrator comments that life is a dream, a dream from which you never wake up but which one day is nonetheless … Continued
(Albany, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2018) Tracy Franz’s memoir, My Year of Dirt and Water: Journal of a Zen Monk’s Wife in Japan, chronicles the year her husband, Koun, attends intensive training in a cloistered temple to become a Zen … Continued
(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018) Andy Plattner’s collection, Dixie Luck, is a stirring read right out of the gate, full of finely crafted short stories, as well as the novella Terminal, winner of the Faulkner Society’s 2016 Gold Medal … Continued
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) “The wind doesn’t choose what it moves / as it moves it: warm rain turning / dust to mud. The wind doesn’t choose” writes Shara Lessley in The Explosive Expert’s Wife, her intimate … Continued
(Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 2018) Reach out your arms. Cup your hands together in a bowl. What do you see in your palms? Of course nothing. Now ask this: What is unseen? If the unseen were a place, … Continued
(Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011) When I cracked open Stolen Pleasures, all I knew about Gina Berriault was that she was a California writer, a “writer’s writer” decked out with major awards but missing the name recognition to match. Before I … Continued
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) At its core, The Surprising Place is a grim yet authentic exploration of the modern American Midwest and the unsatisfied desires that haunt its residents’ interior lives. Malinda McCollum guides readers through the … Continued
(New York: Other Press, 2018) Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thompson is an in-depth historical fiction following the surrealist photographers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore through their first meeting in the early 1900s, their move to 1920s Paris, followed by … Continued
(New Jersey: Serving House Books, 2018) Angela M. Brommel’s debut poetry chapbook, Plutonium & Platinum Blonde, is both a séance in the Mojave Desert and a haunting love letter to Las Vegas. It delivers us to the center of America’s … Continued
(Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2018) Before I moved to the desert, I lived in Seattle, and within walking distance from my apartment was a modest surf shop. I’d rent stand-up paddleboards and, with my small dog at the … Continued
(Warrensburg, MO: Pleiades Press, 2018) Years ago, I used to make scrapbooks. Actually, they were more like photo albums in which I incorporated scraps of things I collected on my overseas journeys. I affixed ticket stubs from museums and trains, … Continued
Heather Lang: Pete, congratulations on the publication of your short story collection, Little Black Dots, out with Chatter House Press. I know that “Little Black Dots” is also the title of one of the short stories in the collection, but … Continued
(Austin, TX: A Strange Object, 2018) Belly Up, the title of Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection, feels like a wave of the hand, beckoning us to cross the threshold of a serving house, walk over to the bar, and lift a … Continued
(New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2018) Kaethe Schwehn’s The Rending and the Nest is a visceral, transcendent tale about creating life out of no life in a post-apocalyptic world. The characters we meet struggle to create normalcy out of tattered fragments. They confront … Continued
It is difficult to make generalizations about Neil Gaiman’s books. His contributions to practically every literary genre have earned him a place in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers. His work … Continued
Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2012) One day recently I was out hiking with my husband in the woods by our new house, and we came upon a stranger. At first he pointed in … Continued
Brandon Davis Jennings grew up as an Air Force Brat and enlisted in the Air Force in 2000. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, he was “augmented” to check for bombs at the entrances to the USAF base on Okinawa … Continued