Fiction Archive
The End of Things
Popular opinion says that during the holiday season, people either fall in love or reflect on their past year of life. Sometimes they do both, but it’s hard to manage these conflicting actions at the same time. One is active, expressive, and outward moving. The other is passive, observational,
Review: SWING TIME by Zadie Smith
In a novel about history, about generations, reading Swing Time is like suddenly remembering a song you used to love.
Review: WHERE WE LAND by Daryl Farmer
And though all the stories follow different lives and the situations they face, it is Farmer’s simultaneous childlike-wonder and knowing restraint that weave these stories together into one, strikingly cohesive collection.
David Lida’s ONE LIFE is the Injection of Humanity for Your Post-Election Blues
Post-election, escapism is the only salve when no one can seem to look each other in the eye. David Lida’s newest novel, ONE LIFE, is exactly the dark-humored piece of literature everyone should be indulging in right now.
A Stone, a Leaf, a Southern Genius
From the moment he steps onscreen in director Michael Grandage’s Genius Thomas Wolfe (played by Jude Law) is an aberration. At 6’5, the writer was literally larger than life. He often worked hovering over a refrigerator-cum-writing desk.
Prophecies, Odds, Fate, and…Your Vote
In the ruins of Moria, at a fork in the mountain tunnels, Gandalf explains to Frodo how the burden of carrying the ring to Mordor was passed to him. The word he uses? “Encouraging.” Tough to swallow, but Frodo learns if it weren’t for him, there would be no
Review: BAD FAITH by Theodore Wheeler
By anchoring his collection around Aaron Kleinhardt, Wheeler creates subtle connections. The stories feel linked in an understated but solid way, creating a canvas with more depth than any one short story alone could give. Wheeler’s characters are people we know.
In Bookstores Near You: OUR HEARTS WILL BURN US DOWN by Anne Valente
Anne Valente’s debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, does not begin with the shattering moment when Caleb Raynor enters Lewis and Clark High School and opens fire—a moment that surely warrants the dimming of the lights, the rising of a curtain. But no, in Valente’s narrative, the
Review: PATRICIDE by D. Foy
The protagonist in D. Foy’s second novel is that angry young kid whose pain and shame he cannot express except in strange orthogonal ways, ways that will only deepen his pain and shame, not alleviate them. But Foy allows us inside that boy’s beleaguered brain box and we feel
On Jess Walter’s “Beautiful Ruins”
In that moment, with the strings swelling to crescendo in your mind as you read it, as Dee Moray the beautiful (but not too beautiful) American actress steps off the boat and onto the shore, Walter writes how Pasquale, the dreamer, fell in love “Not so much with the