News & Extras
Nuala: A Fable by Kimmy Beach
The flyer for Kimmy Beach’s beautifully produced novella Nuala advertises a dystopian future troubled with love, possessiveness, and envy—it lives up to the pitch. But its subtitle, A Fable, points to more. The fable leaves the book open and inscrutable while...
Not For The World Would I Compare It To Anything by Hannah Godfrey
Hannah Godfrey is a formidable storyteller, so much so that even a thoroughly academic dissection of the vagus nerve becomes emotive prose in her chapbook Not For The World Would I Compare It To Anything. The ambitious collection of short stories and essays was...
I Have Something to Tell You by Natalie Appleton
As I read Natalie Appleton’s memoir, I Have Something to Tell You, I was reminded of a time in my life spent wandering toward a certain something I could not define, but that I believed was out there waiting to be found. In I Have Something to Tell You, Appleton...
A Mariner’s Guide to Self-Sabotage by Bill Gaston
In Bill Gaston’s short story “Hello:,” the narrator tells us that, according to some Tibetan Buddhist teachings, guardian spirits called Protectors exist, whose “sole purpose is to promote our wakefulness” and like to do so by “giving us a slap.” This original, vivid,...
The Heavy Bear by Tim Bowling
The Heavy Bear is Tim Bowling’s latest novel and like In the Suicide’s Library (2004) its focus is on the ghosts of great male artists. Where In the Suicide’s Library meanders around the lives of Wallace Stevens and Weldon Keese, The Heavy Bear tracks the ghosts of...
Children Shouldn’t Use Knives by Shirley Camia
Shirley Camia’s eleven spare, imagistic poems are so very slight—wispy, flickering at the edges of what children perceive and remember. Filled out by title pages, epigraph pages, and Cindy Mochizuki’s graceful, taut, drawings, they still make a very slim volume. The...