Body and Bread
Like every person, every family contains contradictions, oppositions. Think of the generally quiet, sober couple who produce a jokester or chatterbox. Or the child who in church looks past her...
View ArticleThis Close: Stories
However closely marriage, parenthood, or circumstance may connect people, divides are perhaps inevitable. The nature and consequences of these divides are central to This Close, Jessica Francis Kane’s...
View ArticleLittle Raw Souls: Stories
Good short stories drop us into the middle of situations we can’t help but find riveting, no matter how strange or uncomfortable they may be. Steven Schwartz’s latest collection, Little Raw Souls, is...
View ArticleInside Madeleine
A patient in a ward of anorexics envies “the protruding bones of someone who is that much closer to not being here at all.” A psychology major finds that her job at a halfway house is replacing her...
View ArticleThe Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories
The complications of romantic partnerships are often explored in fiction, but rarely with the depth and insight that Wendy J. Fox brings to her début story collection, The Seven Stages of Anger, winner...
View ArticleHow I Kiss Her Turning Head
The stories in Jennifer Woodworth’s strangely beautiful How I Kiss Her Turning Head examine the most primal aspects of mother-child bonds, bonds that can surpass love and approach obsession, yet,...
View ArticleGifted and Talented
Who among you remembers those golden days when a middling high school student—a kid with respectable grades but with ACT scores in the toilet, with daydreaming making up a solid sixty percent of her...
View ArticleGhost Horse
One of my reviewing regrets of late is my delay in highly recommending Thomas H. McNeely’s powerful and moving coming-of-age novel Ghost Horse (winner of the Gival Press Novel Award). The setting is...
View ArticleCarry the Sky
Back in December, in a post about grieving during the holidays, I mentioned some new works of fiction (all from small presses) that deal in some way with loss. I am pleased to finally be writing about...
View ArticleSwarm to Glory
Last fall, after posting “Women: please send me your fiction,” I received a number of excellent books by women authors and their publishers. A dear friend and fellow writer who’d seen the post handed...
View ArticlePeople Like You
If you’ve read more than a few of my postings on Small Press Picks, you might have noticed that I’m a big fan of the short story, and I’m always eager to check out new collections from small/indie...
View ArticleThey Could Live with Themselves
An oft-repeated criticism of small towns is that too many residents have an unsavory and insatiable interest in the lives of their neighbors, an interest that no amount of acreage—geographical,...
View ArticleThe Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms
There is much to praise about The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms, Chauna Craig’s début short story collection. But I was especially taken by the stories’ layered explorations of fraught...
View ArticleSkating on the Vertical
Many of the tales in Jan English Leary’s profound, heartfelt story collection, Skating on the Vertical, center on characters who have reached pivotal points in their lives and are trying to figure out...
View ArticleIf the Ice Had Held
The title of this layered and compassionate novel echoes a question that is often asked in the wake of a tragedy: “How might things have been different if _____ hadn’t occurred?” While the novel...
View ArticleAs a River
In her reflective and lyrical début novel, As a River, Sion Dayson explores the hazards of secrets. Whether kept or revealed, they can exact a profound toll: on those who carry them and on those who...
View ArticleLike Wings, Your Hands
In many coming-of-age novels, parents are absent, literally or figuratively. But one of the many distinctions of Elizabeth Earley’s dazzling and incisive new novel, Like Wings, Your Hands, is the...
View ArticleRage Is a Wolf
In the simplest sense, Rage is a Wolf portrays one young woman’s quest to make a difference in the world and to find meaning in her life, outside of the boundaries of high school. But much to this...
View ArticleJillian in the Borderlands
In this imaginative collection of linked stories, “the borderlands” seem to refer not only to the territory along the U.S.-Mexico border–a landscape traversed by the central character, Jillian Guzmán,...
View ArticleHold Still Fast
Described as “prose snapshots,” each of the stories in this evocative, wide-ranging collection captures significant or telling moments, encounters, or observations in 50 words or fewer. Together, they...
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