Book Review: They Kept Running
By Beret OlsenMichelle Ross’s latest collection of flash fiction, They Kept Running, is the 2022 winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for short fiction. It’s also a bruise of a book, bleeding beneath its tender skin, painful and strangely beautiful.
Book Review: The House of Grana Padano
By Celia BlandIn The House of Grana Padano, the collaboration between Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman blends rhythms and styles seamlessly. These two masters of the microfiction form generate a dialectic that plays within the rigorous requirements of their chosen genre.
Book Review: Snowdog
By Beret OlsenIn Snowdog, Kim Chinquee’s latest collection of flash fiction, the writing is clean and concise, the language unornamented. “[T]he best time to make fake snow is when it’s actually snowing,” she writes in the opening story.
Flash Exercise: Cut It In Half
Writers aren’t always sure what is and isn’t necessary in their work, especially since they’ve lovingly crafted every word. Each story will ultimately tell you what it needs, but a great exercise to make that clearer is to cut your story in half.
Book Review: The Bitter Kind
By Beret OlsenThe Bitter Kind is sixty-eight pages of legend, lemons, ghosts, and begonias, shifting deftly between genre and perspective.
Book Review: The Inexplicable Grey Space Called Love
By Beret OlsenChuck Augello's new book, The Inexplicable Grey Space Called Love, enthralled by the magic of words, potent even when I couldn’t fully understand them. Perhaps meaning cannot ever be seen in simple terms.
Review: For Girls Forged by Lightning
By Beret OlsenMolly Fuller's new book, For Girls Forged by Lightning, is as ferocious as it is lyrical. This collection of 51 short pieces of "prose and other poems" is beautiful and brutal. Remember to breathe.
Book Review: Anthropology’s 101 True Love Stories
By Andrea DanielsIf this is a cultural study of a tribe, it’s a tribe with one cuckolded male and 101 beautiful women, virtually all of whom treat his heart with the sentimentality of an ashtray.
Book Review: 420 Characters
By Paul StrohmFor those who didn't know his primary work, this volume's accompanying illustrations reveal Lou Beach as a collage-maker and graphic surrealist, an accomplished maestro of dream-like juxtapositions and mixed surface-depth relations.
Sportin’ Jack: A Guarded, Laconic Jigsaw Puzzle of Memory
By Alex ZwerdlingA hundred hundred-worders? I was expecting something less ambitious in such a tightly restricted form.
