The Best Books of the New Year
Resolved to read more this year? These books are the best the new year has to offer. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist Sunil Yapa Lee Boudreaux Books January 12 $26.00 In his novel about the heated 1999 WTO riots in Seattle, Sunil Yapa writes:
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Beach Boys” by Michelle Meyers
In these modern times, we have greater access to the news of the wide world than ever before. In the flash fiction piece “Beach Boys” (decomp), Michelle Meyers explores two twins who tried their best to avoid the headlines of their times, only to be drawn in despite their
Book Review: MEMORY THEATER by Simon Critchley
Memory Theater Simon Critchley Other Press, Nov 2015 112 pp, $15.95 Buy hardcover | eBook What I remember most from reading Thomas Harris’ Hannibal when it was first published in 1999 was not the graphic violence and strange character detour for which the book would be criticized; it was
Ways of Beginning
New Year’s Eve has always struck me as sort of a strained holiday. The newness it represents feels invisible to me, no matter the countdowns and music and noisemakers piled on it—a threshold in the air, a line that’s there because we say it is. I’m always so aware
Squad Books
Look, I’m not trying to be Internetty. But at the end of a year I’ve spent thinking a lot about friendship, I don’t want my last post to be another family tree. Instead, I want to write about books that are my friends. I want to write about the
Round-Down: Rounding Up the Submission Fee Debate
In recent years, most literary journals have begun to accept online submissions through popular managers like Submittable–many, too, have begun to only accept submissions in this way, eschewing the old-guard snail-mail submission method entirely. This new approach certainly has its upsides–in many cases the switch has resulted in faster
The Year In Humor
2015 was an awful, depressing year for current events. The violence was so widespread that to reduce it to a single sentence like this is to vastly undermine the scale and gravitas of human suffering endured. With California out of water and the unsettling winter heat wave currently afflicting
A Castle in Our Backyard: Activating Imaginations in Ireland
The fiction writing workshop I’m teaching for Spalding University is winding down the day I discover that, behind Oyster Lodge, where our classes meet, at the end of Galway Bay, there’s a small castle. I’m satisfyingly tired after exploring Dublin and Galway through the lenses of their literature and
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Brought to Shore” by Nicholas Olson
Patients with terminal conditions face many difficulties outside of the symptoms themself. In “Brought to Shore” (SmokeLong Quarterly), Nicholas Olson explores a family struggling through the emotional realities of a parent living on borrowed time. Olson opens the story with a memory of a camping trip with the narrator’s
“Subjects We Never Completely Learn”: An Interview with Daniel Nester
Daniel Nester’s prose zings back and forth between the heart and the funny bone. His latest book, Shader, is a kaleidoscopic coming-of-age story told in brief chapters called “notes.” It’s like one of those family slideshows that make us laugh, groan, squirm in our chairs, and sometimes cry. His