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Triumph of Female Empowerment: a review by Claire Polders of Let Our Bodies Be Returned to Us by Lynn Mundell
by Claire Polders | Apr 1, 2022
I’ve been a fan of Lynn Mundell’s writing ever since I discovered her work in 2015, so when her debut collection won the Yemassee 2021 Fiction Prize, I was not surprised. Mundell is a master of the darkly funny and tenderly magical. In this collection, she...
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Michelle Ross’s They Kept Running, review by Dan Crawley
They Kept Running (University of North Texas Press, 2022) by Michelle Ross is the 2021 Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. As I read this gem of a book by one of my favorite writers, I was not surprised this collection of flash fictions...
A review of Jayne Martin’s Daddy Chronicles by Jonathan Cardew
Less is more, so they say. But more what? In Jayne Martin’s case: more devastating, more incisive, more insightful. This book is a case in point. Through 37 bite-sized chapters, each about 100-300 words, Martin recounts her experiences growing up without a...
A Review of Stella Lei’s, “Inheritances of Hunger” by Amy Cipolla Barnes
Pull up a seat to Stella Lei’s word table with her collection Inheritances of Hunger. It feeds the soul in five story courses: “Games,” “Changeling,” “On Building a Nest,” “Graftings,” and “Meals for the End of the World.” Throughout, she...
Triumph of Female Empowerment: a review by Claire Polders of Let Our Bodies Be Returned to Us by Lynn Mundell
I’ve been a fan of Lynn Mundell’s writing ever since I discovered her work in 2015, so when her debut collection won the Yemassee 2021 Fiction Prize, I was not surprised. Mundell is a master of the darkly funny and tenderly magical. In this collection, she...
With the Help of Leigh Chadwick, I Review Shane Kowalski’s Small Moods
by Leigh Chadwick I first came across Shane Kowalski’s writing while doom-scrolling through Leigh Chadwick’s Twitter feed. It was a piece of flash fiction—nothing more than a slight paragraph. It’s been months since I read that piece of Shane Kowalski’s writing on...
How Far I’ve Come by Kim Magowan
How Far I've Come by Kim Magowan, review by Dan Crawley Kim Magowan’s How Far I’ve Come (Gold Wake Press, 2022) is a collection of flash fictions and a few longer works that brought me joy while I read. Yes, I smiled with delight, finding myself smiling time...
A Review Q&A with Myself on the Subject of Dan Crawley’s Collection The Wind, It Swirls with the Principal Answer Being I Couldn’t Put This Book Down by Jonathan Cardew
Q: Could you put this book down? A: No, I could not. I could not put this book down. Q: Why is it you couldn’t put this book down? Can you put your finger on the reason? A: I think there are many reasons. The stories fizz with interesting characters and...
TURMERIC & SUGAR: STORIES by Anna Vangala Jones; review by Dan Crawley
The debut short story collection, Turmeric & Sugar: Stories by Anna Vangala Jones (Thirty West Publishing House), is a feast for the senses and a tour of the challenges of love, triumph, and regret. Throughout, Jones’s prose is a wonderful mix of magic...
My Fave Five- May 2021
May 2021 Series Curator: Jonathan Cardew May Selector: Andrew Bertaina What’s rare, what’s bright, what’s new? This is what we ask a new writer every month in search of the best hybrid, poetry, and flash writing from the previous month. In this edition, we catch up...
MY FAVE FIVE- APRIL 2021
April 2021 Series Curator: Jonathan Cardew April Selector: Minyoung Lee What’s rare, what’s bright, what’s new? This is what we ask a new writer every month in search of the best hybrid, poetry, and flash writing from the previous month. In this edition, we catch up...
BENDING GENRES PRESENTS!!! Meg Tuite interviews Garielle Lutz about writing, life and so much more! So honored to have these two amazing writers in conversation…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTIyc9wIjL0 And you can order Gari's new book, WORSTED, from SF/LD here: https://www.hobartpulp.com/books/worsted
My Fave Five- March 2021
March 2021 Series Curator: Jonathan Cardew March Selector: Hannah Grieco What’s rare, what’s bright, what’s new? This is what we ask a new writer every month in search of the best hybrid, poetry, and flash writing from the previous month. In this edition, we catch up...
What Are The Chances? by Robert Scotellaro (review by Paul Beckman)
In Robert Scotellaro’s latest collection of gems, “What Are the Chances” he tells us the chances that way only he could write of lovers, friends, family, and more in a way that leaves you shaking your head in wonderment with these fast-paced stories filled...
Time. Wow. by Neil Clark (review by Jonathan Cardew)
Full disclosure: I am a complete and utter sci-fi nerd. Give me Star Trek. Give me LeGuin. Give me 2001: A Space Odyssey. Give me anything that is not of this planet/ space-time continuum-related/full of stars. So when I first came across Neil Clark’s small,...
Demolition in the Tropics by Rogan Kelly (review by Alina Stefanescu)
Rogan Kelly. Demolition in the Tropics. Lewisburg, PA: Seven Kitchens Press, 2019. 28 pages. $9.00. Some readers expect to be punched in the gut repeatedly. Demolition in the Tropics is not for them. Rogan Kelly's poetic line is wistful, impressionistic, similar to...
Death, Desire and Other Destinations by Tara Isabel Zambrano (review by Dan Crawley)
Tara Isabel Zambrano’s full-length flash collection, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations (Okay Donkey Press, 2020), illuminates, enchants. I’m awestruck with Zambrano’s effortless talent, her swings from stark realism to inventive magic realism. She is...
Ghosts of You by Cathy Ulrich (reviewed by Audra Kerr Brown)
Audra Kerr Brown lives betwixt the corn and soybean fields of southeast Iowa with her husband and two children.
Bending Genres Q & A with author Karen Stefano (What A Body Remembers) and Emily Bertholf
Q & A : Interview with Karen Stefano, author of What A Body Remembers. Emily Bertholf: Your latest book is a memoir about the life-altering night in 1984 when you were violently attacked on your way home from work and your long struggle of dealing with...
Business Days Only
(This is an experimental piece. The repetition and strikethroughs are intentional.) Business Days Only June 24, 2022, 9:00 am ET Beyond her stirruped spread legs, the doctor recites the words from a script written by the State. He avoids her eyes as he speaks, his...
Freud did have a point
I’m attending some sort of spiritual retreat in another country, and on the last evening each participant showcases their passion in life. A fellow participant asks me to sing with her, but she won’t practice or give me the song…she just sings it once and expects me...
Three Flash Drafts
We Choose This She’s slurring again, asking the same questions as lastnight, the same ones answered this morning. At times, when I’ve bought the ticket and need the ride, this infinite loop is a relief—cork, pour, smoke, pour again, smoke, smoke smoke, cork, pour,...
Baja Roads PartIII
I caught a glimmer of blue on the eastern horizon, just a thin strip, hovering above desert brown. I called to the back of the van, "Look kids, we can see the water.” I heard them scramble up on our wooden storage cabinets to look out the window. It was the northern...
The Knowledge of Unknowing
(I struggled with the prompts, then went with this) Well over fifty relatives gather. Been a long time since the man walks into a room of this branch of his family. A withholding of sorts, mostly absent 36 years. The man carries a weight that he does not share....
Three Flashes
Hand Rest When I ask, “Who did this to you?” her eyes barely bloom, veiled as they are, in bleak weather, no different than a smear of confused crows. When I start, “Honey—" she snaps back, “Fucking don’t call me that anymore.” When I reach for her hand across the...
East Texas cotton blues
A hundred pounds is too much to pull for a little boy ––Lightning’ Hopkins he’d come up from the soil of a promise undelivered dream deferred come up on red-soil piney woods East Texas skinny hard scrabble, hard toil,...
Not a Prayer & The Becoming
Not a Prayer Is there a god within my hands, is there one behind my eyes, is there, perhaps, a god hidden between my thighs? No, and no, and no. Was there a god when my sister died, was there one for my...
night looms blues
I. passages barred narrowed like slaughterhouse chutes pinpoint paranoia bleeds staining & paralyzing into indecision an anxious buddha whispering don’t try over & over again fretfully inactive II. stacking seconds like...
The Terminator (or How I Learned to Love My Mother)
by Kona Morris
Imagine it—a four-foot-eleven, ninety-pound Jewish woman from Brooklyn with a metabolism permanently set to hummingbird, who constantly tries to...
We Hadn’t Had the Best of Relationships
I’d heard prisoners were getting vaccinated, so I decided to get arrested. I wasn’t the only one. A temporary station was set up at the old Maytag...
Bending Genres Reading for SMOLfair- March 5, 2021 at 9:00 p.m. E.S.T. This Friday, we have a great line-up for our Bending Genres Reading for the...
What Are The Chances? by Robert Scotellaro (review by Paul Beckman)
by Paul Beckman
In Robert Scotellaro’s latest collection of gems, “What Are the Chances” he tells us the chances that way only he could write of lovers,...
Time. Wow. by Neil Clark (review by Jonathan Cardew)
Full disclosure: I am a complete and utter sci-fi nerd. Give me Star Trek. Give me LeGuin. Give me 2001: A Space Odyssey. Give me anything...
My Fave 5 – October 2020
October 2020 Series Curator: Jonathan Cardew August Selector: Tommy Dean What’s rare, what’s bright, what’s new? This is what we ask a new writer...
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