Fiction Archive
Review: LIVING IN THE WEATHER OF THE WORLD by Richard Bausch
While not all of the fourteen stories in his new collection are a fair illustration of his ability, the balance demonstrates, once again, why he deserves a lasting place among American literary masters.
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ERNESTO by Umberto Saba
Umberto Saba died four years after writing Ernesto (1953), and it went unpublished until 1975 when its content would have been far less radical than in 1953.
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Female Eroticism in The Wallcreeper and The Argonauts
What’s missing in the literary world, especially when it comes to women, is a dialogue around anal sex.
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Review: THE GYPSY MOTH SUMMER by Julia Fierro
There are many hard edges here—a pervading sense of doom hovers throughout—but my favorite moments are when we get to see the softer, more interior side of these characters.
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Review: THE WIDOW’S GUIDE TO EDIBLE MUSHROOMS by Chauna Craig
Most of the stories in The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms, Chauna Craig’s debut collection, are set in the American West, centered on characters who often identify closely with their geography ... And while Craig convincingly portrays a range of characters, her work is particularly striking when she writes
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Rural Pride in the Walleye Capital of the World: Emily Fridlund’s HISTORY OF WOLVES
Loose River is a town where the two key descriptions of Christmastime are “competing nativity scenes” and the “strings of colored lights up and down Main Street.” Linda, the protagonist, thinks in terms of natural geography: her friend lives “in a trailer three lakes over.”
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Beyond War: Jorge Argueta’s Poetic Memoir and Moving Beyond Displacement
As with other non-fictional accounts and ruminations on the Salvadoran civil war, Argueta is not afraid to look the violence and trauma of the war in the eye with Flesh Wounds: A Poetic Memoir.
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Review: PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee
Pachinko is as much a story about money and prejudice as it about colonialism, war and globalization. Lee explores how politics effect the family unit, but more profoundly and perhaps perniciously, individuals’ sense of identity and self-worth that underpin their decisions.
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Review: AFTER THE DAM by Amy Hassinger
But although Dam contains intriguing traces of family saga and love story, there is nothing formulaic about this layered novel, an often lyrical elegy to the natural world that raises environmental and feminist questions about boundaries of property and self, the reconciliation of love and principles, and the limits
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Laurence Sterne’s Beating Hearts
Though it’s less travel writing and more personal memoir, Laurence Sterne’s A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY contains one of the most authentic, challenging descriptions of why one might journey from their home in the first place.
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