Seven years ago, I stumbled upon Mark Leidner's writing during a studio visit with the abstract painter Alexander Ross. Flipping through Beauty Is the Case That They Gave Me, I stumbled upon this stanza from the poem Gossip: Talent is to honesty what...
Microviews
Swetha Amit interviews Beth Sherman about her new flash novella, How to Get There From Here
Swetha Amit: Take us back to the beginning of your book How to Get There from Here. Where did the first spark come from, and how did the project evolve from that initial idea? Beth Sherman: I was going to write about a fractured family and had 32 stories written....
Review of Samuel Delaney’s NOVA by David McNicholas
Notes on Samuel Delany's Nova 1968 – 2026. Earth. Nova is a world confident with mystery. Its queerness is embodied in literal one-shoe-on-one-shoe-off space pirates and the neuro-congruent defect shared by several main characters. The text is...
Surprised by the Deliciousness of Air: A Second Person Review of Réka Nyitrai’s Conjoined Works Split Split and Game of Little Deaths by Jonathan Cardew
You think there’s something almost kinky about Nyitrai’s two works in one, a book you have to physically flip if you want to read the other. Two works lying in bed together, toe to nose. The middle of the book, a sort of portal, contains the following...
Review of Burnside Soleil’s Berceuse Parish by Francois Bereaud
The epigraph of this remarkable collection (whose title I’ve shortened for obvious reason) reads: “Enterrez-moi là où mon père est enterré.” (Bury me there where my father is buried) which we are told is a line from an Acadian ballad. It’s also the perfect...
Swetha Amit interviews Josh Dale about Rage, his new chapbook of flash gems
SA: RAGE is a compelling collection of flash stories that explore themes of death, loss, and brokenness. What inspired this collection? JD: RAGE began as a few stories set in a suburbanized rural setting, where the characters are doing their thing. Some are on drugs....
Review of Kristina Ten’s Tell Me Yours I’ll Tell You Mine by Francois Bereaud
A few years ago, I went to the Pinball Museum in Asheville, North Carolina. The price of admission got me unlimited play on over 100 machines with themes across the years of my youth. The 3D aspect of pinball, the flashing lights, the sound of the silver balls...
Review of Brendan Gillen’s Hang Time by Francois Bereaud
As it turns out, there is a wrong way to fire a machine gun. We watch sports for lots of reasons. One of them is to find out what happens next. In any game or event, there’s always the possibility of seeing, hearing, or sensing something for the first time, whether...
Maia Cardew interview with Cactus Club owner, Kelsey Kaufmann
Recently, I had the pleasure to discuss one of my favorite Milwaukee venues with none other than owner Kelsey Kauffman. Cactus Club has been a pillar of the Milwaukee community for over a century, beginning as an Italian Anarchist book club in the early 1900s. Today,...
Review of Kristin Tenor’s This is How They Mourn by Jonathan Cardew
On Loss and Losing: A Review of Kristin Tenor’s This is How They Mourn (Thirty West Press) When I received Kristin Tenor’s book for review, I was headed to England to take care of my dad. He was dying of cancer, and I was there to help him along. I didn’t get to the...
Maia Cardew’s October Playlist
Some gently upbeat sounds to keep you going this fall, every other band local to Wisconsin... Track 1: Debora, "Diet Lite" Track 2: Veruca Salt, "Get Back" Track 3: Social Cig, "Yellow Weekends" Track 4: Elliott Smith, "Waltz No. 2 (XO)" Track 5: Yolk, "Lemonade...
Review of Kiik Araki- Kawaguchi’s Disintegration Made Plain and Easy by Yetta Stein
In the penultimate poem of Disintegration Made Plain and Easy — the recently published collection crafted by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi — we are running “naked thrashing and failing / Through a storm of yellowjackets”. Or, not we, but the poem’s speaker. We don’t...
Review of Dancing Backwards Toward Pluperfect by Koss, by Matthew Freeman
I was so honored to receive Koss’ new collection, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect (Diode Editions), and I wasn’t disappointed. To be honest, I was sold at “Pluperfect”, being something of an armchair grammarian. And as the journey went along, I saw such...
Review of Cold Toast by Kathryn Aldridge- Morris by Sarah Freligh
Is there a difference between a collection of pieces and a book? As a fiction writer and a poet, I want to think so—and so, apparently, did Robert Frost when he posited that if there are twenty-four poems, the twenty-fifth poem needs to be the book, that is, an...
Review of Select Screen by Abigail Stewart by François Bereaud
Let’s stipulate that we all spend time too much time on our phones / online (kudos to any of you who don’t). Given that fact, and the associated guilt I feel for falling into the “too much” category, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to enjoy Abigail Stewart’s novel Select...
Review of Tina Barry’s I Tell Henrietta by Britta Stromeyer
Tina Barry's I Tell Henrietta, a collaboration with artist Kristin Flynn, is a riveting miscellany of poetry, prose, and art that defies traditional genre boundaries. This imaginative collection reads like a novella, weaving together fragments of a life story...
Review of Nate Lippens’ Ripcord, by David John Baer McNicholas
Ripcord, by Nate Lippens, is a riveting collection of aborted facebook posts and tweets chronicling a year in the life of a bartender and catering server. But, like a few of us understand, this is an identity assumed for survival. Lippens' narrator and his text...
Review by David McNicholas: Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver, aWord Search
Order a Copy
Review of Benjamin Drevlow’s Honky by Francois Bereaud
After I read a book and let it sit and soak in for a while, there’s a game I like to play with certain texts and writers. I open the book to a random page and find a line which stuns with its beauty, weirdness, imagery, or some other facet of great writing. Often, I...
Review of Christy Tending’s High Priestess of the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Disobedience by François Bereaud
The introduction to Christy Tending’s remarkable memoir in flash essays, High Priestess of the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Disobedience, opens with the following questions: How do we meet the feeling that the world as we know it is ending? How do we maintain...
Review of Steve Passey’s In Line At Walmart With All The Other Damned by Francois Bereaud
Steve Passey is from Alberta, Canada, a place I take to have lots of space and relatively few people. In his remarkable collection, In Line At Walmart with All the Other Damned (Cowboy Jamboree Press), Passey manages to give us both the intimacy of lives lived hard...
Review of Terese Svoboda’s Dog On Fire by David John Baer McNicholas
The dead do not simply disappear underground. This is something every murderer learns; you keep what you kill. It’s true in more subtle ways when death is inflicted more slowly through family dynamics. Svoboda’s narrator lives in a town where she can’t escape her dead...
Bending Genres Q & A with author Kathryn Silver- Hajo
Kathryn attended our Bending Genres retreat at Synergia Ranch, outside of Santa Fe last August 2023. We asked Kathryn six questions about her experience at the retreat and her writing. What went into the decision to attend the Bending Genres Synergia Ranch August 2023...
It’s God’s Fog Up Top: A Review of Benjamin Niespodziany’s Cardboard Clouds by Jonathan Cardew Who Quotes Various Lines from the Work Instead of a Traditional Review (Plus a Few Pics) Partly Because He is Lazy and Partly Because He Doesn’t Want to Debase This Extraordinary Hybrid Collection of One-act Plays and Prose Poem Oddities with the Mundanity of Review Language Hence This Recycled Homage to Language Play Itself (and a Few Pics)
Language! “The symphony in the pit consists of rhythmic minimalists.” “Lips like witch” “The sky is a sweltering velvet, held together by loose nails.” “Low. But also loud. Like a herd of cattle. Like dark, dark dust. Dense. Shut up.” “She sews a wisdom tooth into her...
Review of Shannon Wolf’s Green Card Girl
by Francois Bereaud “It’s the things you don’t expect to miss that hit you the hardest.” This line from Green Card Girl, a prose poetry collection from the British-American writer Shannon Wolf hit me hard. In this, her first collection published by ELJ Press,...
Review of Laurie Marshall’s Proof of Life by Francois Bereaud
“At first, you think it’s snowing.” This opening line of “Some of Your Favorite Things Aren’t Made to Last,” the first story in Laurie Marshall’s masterful flash collection, Proof of Life, sets the tone for an unexpected and wild, but, ultimately, very...
Process, Process, Process: A Review of Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash by Michael Loveday (review by Jonathan Cardew)
When I opened up Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash by Michael Loveday, I did what I imagine most writers will do when they get this brilliant guide: I wrangled and chivvied a bunch of flashes into a novella-in-flash. Ergo, this guide works. It’s...
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...
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...
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...
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (reviewed by Haley Papa)
Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir reads like a whispered truth only she can give the reader, and a different take on what a memoir entails. Machado first entered the literary world with her short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties in 2017, and now sets...
Juliet the Maniac by Juliet Escoria (reviewed by Emily Bertholf)
Juliet is an adolescent girl. Juliet is a cutter. Juliet is dizzy. Juliet is bored. Juliet is afraid of birds. Juliet is feeling helpless. Juliet is a machine. Juliet is any old kid. Juliet is...
the Internet is for real by Chris Campanioni (reviewed by Emily Bertholf)
Chris Campanioni’s the Internet is for real: a review in phrasal substitutions and futuristic fabrication by Emily Bertholf Rad Fib #1: from Only You Can See What You Saved (Full Size Render) Full Size Render is the stranger of this shadow. Full Size Render is...
Bending Genres Q & A with author William R. Soldan
Bending Genres Interview with Author William R. Soldan: What went into the decision to attend the Taos Mabel Dodge Bending Genres July 2018 Writing Retreat? -With the exception of attending a weeklong writing workshop in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2014, after being...
The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb (reviewed by Levi Andrew Noe)
Identity. To say it’s complicated is like saying that losing an arm might hurt a bit. Family is complex too, except that’s more like saying that lopping off your head might make filing your own taxes problematic. For Davon Loeb, identity and family are the foundations...
Some Field Notes on Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003 – 2018 by Kathy Fish (in Randomized Order) Published by Matter Press
Final Thought: Buy this Book. The Lines That Would Not Be Considered “Killer” But Are “Killer” Because They Are Not Necessarily “Killer”: “The man stretches his legs out. He mutes the television and chuckles. She thinks he muted the television to make sure she...
You Might Want to Get a Handjob from Rick Moranis: A Review of Madam Velvet’s Cabaret Of Oddities by Nancy Stohlman
I mean, possibly. Nothing’s beyond the conceivable, especially when Stohlman’s in the car. When she’s driving it, and it’s a clown car, and one of the clown’s in the upside down position “because Marty needs a break,” anything becomes possible (like fantasy handjobs...
Random-and-Oftentimes-Fabricated Statistics About Sad Laughter (Brian Alan Ellis), by Ryan Werner
(329) The number of times I thought “These were tweets, right?” (0) The number of times I actually went to Brian’s Twitter to check if these were tweets because, much like the aura and culture of literature are constantly pointed out to be in Sad Laughter, that would...
Three Men on the Edge by Michael Loveday; V. Press, U.K.
Everything explained? Boring. Linear plot? Boring. Long chapters? Boring. Three Men on the Edge by Michael Loveday? Not boring. This book—the first full-length flash collection from UK-based V. Press—takes us to the edge of traditional prose and veers into poetry....
Show Her A Flower by Peg Alford Pursell; Second Edition, WTAW Press
Ever focus so hard on a star that it disappears? The human eye’s anatomical constraints allow for only oblique attention to life’s wonders. The heart likewise skews in relation to life’s calamities. In her collection, Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, Peg Alford...
Bending Genres Q & A with author Lynn Mundell
Lynn Mundell attended our first Bending Genres retreat at Synergia Ranch, outside of Santa Fe last September. We asked Lynn six questions about her experience at the retreat and her writing: What went into the decision to attend the Synergia Ranch September 2017...
Kiss, Kiss by Paul Beckman, Truth Serum Press
It’s not especially shocking to find a teenaged narrator playing strip poker with his elderly babysitter in Paul Beckman’s latest flash fiction collection, Kiss Kiss. In fact, that kid is probably better off than the boy who finds his brothers waiting to kill the...
I Don’t Know About You But by Kara Vernor
I Don’t Know About You But by Kara Vernor, [A Craft Essay] I read and write because it’s cheaper than travelling and the second best way I know to surprise myself and feel something new. To remind myself that my daily trappings—showering, running my face through a...
The Expanse Between by Lee L. Krecklow, Winter Goose Publishing
Wisconsinite Lee L. Krecklow's novel raises interesting questions about storytelling and ethics. He pits the “I saw it, I own it” social media mindset vs individual privacy rights. Thomas Stone, a reclusive writer whose early success never gained traction, is...
A Report on Reports by Brian Evenson (The Cupboard, 2018)
A Report on Reports by Brian Evenson (The Cupboard, 2018) by Jonathan Cardew I was going to write a report on Reports by Brian Evenson—and I still am, it’s still happening right now—but I must admit to a little bit of trepidation in doing so....
All The Ghosts We’ve Always Had by Jules Archer, Thirty West Publishing, 2018
All the Ghosts We’ve Always Had by Jules Archer, Thirty West Publishing House, 2018 By Robert Scotellaro Here is a gutsy mosaic of moments. Moments masterfully and poetically rendered. Authentic travels through growth and living. Of family fractures and survival....
We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida, New Stories from a Sinking Peninsula, edited by Shane Hinton, Burrow Press, 2017
We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida, New Stories from a Sinking Peninsula, edited by Shane Hinton, Burrow Press, 2017 by Jennifer Fliss Burrow Press has curated a collection as weird, wacky, and diverse as that southern spongey mass of terrain and people… in a good...
Plots Are For Dead People by Jacqueline Doyle
PLOTS ARE FOR DEAD PEOPLE Jacqueline Doyle Who knows what attracted me to flash ten years ago? I hate following rules, for one thing, and as far as I could see it was a genre without rules. Within the maximum word count, anything was possible. My first flash was a...
Other Household Toxins by Christopher Allen, Matter Press, 2018
A collage review of Christopher Allen's Other Household Toxins by April Bradley (in author Allen’s own words) Waves like they fathered the tides: “My world is not broken. My world is not broken.” Freaks to Lynn are portents, stunned by the big dumb beauty of men...
Ashley Yang-Thompson Interviews Mark Leidner/ Micro-review of Elegy for Pangea
Seven years ago, I stumbled upon Mark Leidner's writing during a studio visit with the abstract painter Alexander Ross. Flipping through Beauty Is the Case That They Gave Me, I stumbled upon this stanza from the poem Gossip: Talent is to honesty what...
Swetha Amit interviews Beth Sherman about her new flash novella, How to Get There From Here
Swetha Amit: Take us back to the beginning of your book How to Get There from Here. Where did the first spark come from, and how did the project evolve from that initial idea? Beth Sherman: I was going to write about a fractured family and had 32 stories written....
Review of Samuel Delaney’s NOVA by David McNicholas
Notes on Samuel Delany's Nova 1968 – 2026. Earth. Nova is a world confident with mystery. Its queerness is embodied in literal one-shoe-on-one-shoe-off space pirates and the neuro-congruent defect shared by several main characters. The text is...
Surprised by the Deliciousness of Air: A Second Person Review of Réka Nyitrai’s Conjoined Works Split Split and Game of Little Deaths by Jonathan Cardew
You think there’s something almost kinky about Nyitrai’s two works in one, a book you have to physically flip if you want to read the other. Two works lying in bed together, toe to nose. The middle of the book, a sort of portal, contains the following...
Review of Burnside Soleil’s Berceuse Parish by Francois Bereaud
The epigraph of this remarkable collection (whose title I’ve shortened for obvious reason) reads: “Enterrez-moi là où mon père est enterré.” (Bury me there where my father is buried) which we are told is a line from an Acadian ballad. It’s also the perfect...
Swetha Amit interviews Josh Dale about Rage, his new chapbook of flash gems
SA: RAGE is a compelling collection of flash stories that explore themes of death, loss, and brokenness. What inspired this collection? JD: RAGE began as a few stories set in a suburbanized rural setting, where the characters are doing their thing. Some are on drugs....
Review of Kristina Ten’s Tell Me Yours I’ll Tell You Mine by Francois Bereaud
A few years ago, I went to the Pinball Museum in Asheville, North Carolina. The price of admission got me unlimited play on over 100 machines with themes across the years of my youth. The 3D aspect of pinball, the flashing lights, the sound of the silver balls...
Review of Brendan Gillen’s Hang Time by Francois Bereaud
As it turns out, there is a wrong way to fire a machine gun. We watch sports for lots of reasons. One of them is to find out what happens next. In any game or event, there’s always the possibility of seeing, hearing, or sensing something for the first time, whether...
Maia Cardew interview with Cactus Club owner, Kelsey Kaufmann
Recently, I had the pleasure to discuss one of my favorite Milwaukee venues with none other than owner Kelsey Kauffman. Cactus Club has been a pillar of the Milwaukee community for over a century, beginning as an Italian Anarchist book club in the early 1900s. Today,...
Review of Kristin Tenor’s This is How They Mourn by Jonathan Cardew
On Loss and Losing: A Review of Kristin Tenor’s This is How They Mourn (Thirty West Press) When I received Kristin Tenor’s book for review, I was headed to England to take care of my dad. He was dying of cancer, and I was there to help him along. I didn’t get to the...
Maia Cardew’s October Playlist
Some gently upbeat sounds to keep you going this fall, every other band local to Wisconsin... Track 1: Debora, "Diet Lite" Track 2: Veruca Salt, "Get Back" Track 3: Social Cig, "Yellow Weekends" Track 4: Elliott Smith, "Waltz No. 2 (XO)" Track 5: Yolk, "Lemonade...
Review of Kiik Araki- Kawaguchi’s Disintegration Made Plain and Easy by Yetta Stein
In the penultimate poem of Disintegration Made Plain and Easy — the recently published collection crafted by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi — we are running “naked thrashing and failing / Through a storm of yellowjackets”. Or, not we, but the poem’s speaker. We don’t...
Review of Dancing Backwards Toward Pluperfect by Koss, by Matthew Freeman
I was so honored to receive Koss’ new collection, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect (Diode Editions), and I wasn’t disappointed. To be honest, I was sold at “Pluperfect”, being something of an armchair grammarian. And as the journey went along, I saw such...
Review of Cold Toast by Kathryn Aldridge- Morris by Sarah Freligh
Is there a difference between a collection of pieces and a book? As a fiction writer and a poet, I want to think so—and so, apparently, did Robert Frost when he posited that if there are twenty-four poems, the twenty-fifth poem needs to be the book, that is, an...
Review of Select Screen by Abigail Stewart by François Bereaud
Let’s stipulate that we all spend time too much time on our phones / online (kudos to any of you who don’t). Given that fact, and the associated guilt I feel for falling into the “too much” category, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to enjoy Abigail Stewart’s novel Select...
Review of Tina Barry’s I Tell Henrietta by Britta Stromeyer
Tina Barry's I Tell Henrietta, a collaboration with artist Kristin Flynn, is a riveting miscellany of poetry, prose, and art that defies traditional genre boundaries. This imaginative collection reads like a novella, weaving together fragments of a life story...
Review of Nate Lippens’ Ripcord, by David John Baer McNicholas
Ripcord, by Nate Lippens, is a riveting collection of aborted facebook posts and tweets chronicling a year in the life of a bartender and catering server. But, like a few of us understand, this is an identity assumed for survival. Lippens' narrator and his text...
Review by David McNicholas: Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver, aWord Search
Order a Copy
Review of Benjamin Drevlow’s Honky by Francois Bereaud
After I read a book and let it sit and soak in for a while, there’s a game I like to play with certain texts and writers. I open the book to a random page and find a line which stuns with its beauty, weirdness, imagery, or some other facet of great writing. Often, I...
Review of Christy Tending’s High Priestess of the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Disobedience by François Bereaud
The introduction to Christy Tending’s remarkable memoir in flash essays, High Priestess of the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Disobedience, opens with the following questions: How do we meet the feeling that the world as we know it is ending? How do we maintain...
Review of Steve Passey’s In Line At Walmart With All The Other Damned by Francois Bereaud
Steve Passey is from Alberta, Canada, a place I take to have lots of space and relatively few people. In his remarkable collection, In Line At Walmart with All the Other Damned (Cowboy Jamboree Press), Passey manages to give us both the intimacy of lives lived hard...
Review of Terese Svoboda’s Dog On Fire by David John Baer McNicholas
The dead do not simply disappear underground. This is something every murderer learns; you keep what you kill. It’s true in more subtle ways when death is inflicted more slowly through family dynamics. Svoboda’s narrator lives in a town where she can’t escape her dead...
Bending Genres Q & A with author Kathryn Silver- Hajo
Kathryn attended our Bending Genres retreat at Synergia Ranch, outside of Santa Fe last August 2023. We asked Kathryn six questions about her experience at the retreat and her writing. What went into the decision to attend the Bending Genres Synergia Ranch August 2023...
It’s God’s Fog Up Top: A Review of Benjamin Niespodziany’s Cardboard Clouds by Jonathan Cardew Who Quotes Various Lines from the Work Instead of a Traditional Review (Plus a Few Pics) Partly Because He is Lazy and Partly Because He Doesn’t Want to Debase This Extraordinary Hybrid Collection of One-act Plays and Prose Poem Oddities with the Mundanity of Review Language Hence This Recycled Homage to Language Play Itself (and a Few Pics)
Language! “The symphony in the pit consists of rhythmic minimalists.” “Lips like witch” “The sky is a sweltering velvet, held together by loose nails.” “Low. But also loud. Like a herd of cattle. Like dark, dark dust. Dense. Shut up.” “She sews a wisdom tooth into her...
Review of Shannon Wolf’s Green Card Girl
by Francois Bereaud “It’s the things you don’t expect to miss that hit you the hardest.” This line from Green Card Girl, a prose poetry collection from the British-American writer Shannon Wolf hit me hard. In this, her first collection published by ELJ Press,...
Review of Laurie Marshall’s Proof of Life by Francois Bereaud
“At first, you think it’s snowing.” This opening line of “Some of Your Favorite Things Aren’t Made to Last,” the first story in Laurie Marshall’s masterful flash collection, Proof of Life, sets the tone for an unexpected and wild, but, ultimately, very...
Process, Process, Process: A Review of Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash by Michael Loveday (review by Jonathan Cardew)
When I opened up Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash by Michael Loveday, I did what I imagine most writers will do when they get this brilliant guide: I wrangled and chivvied a bunch of flashes into a novella-in-flash. Ergo, this guide works. It’s...
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...
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...
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...
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (reviewed by Haley Papa)
Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir reads like a whispered truth only she can give the reader, and a different take on what a memoir entails. Machado first entered the literary world with her short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties in 2017, and now sets...
Juliet the Maniac by Juliet Escoria (reviewed by Emily Bertholf)
Juliet is an adolescent girl. Juliet is a cutter. Juliet is dizzy. Juliet is bored. Juliet is afraid of birds. Juliet is feeling helpless. Juliet is a machine. Juliet is any old kid. Juliet is...
the Internet is for real by Chris Campanioni (reviewed by Emily Bertholf)
Chris Campanioni’s the Internet is for real: a review in phrasal substitutions and futuristic fabrication by Emily Bertholf Rad Fib #1: from Only You Can See What You Saved (Full Size Render) Full Size Render is the stranger of this shadow. Full Size Render is...
Bending Genres Q & A with author William R. Soldan
Bending Genres Interview with Author William R. Soldan: What went into the decision to attend the Taos Mabel Dodge Bending Genres July 2018 Writing Retreat? -With the exception of attending a weeklong writing workshop in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2014, after being...
The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb (reviewed by Levi Andrew Noe)
Identity. To say it’s complicated is like saying that losing an arm might hurt a bit. Family is complex too, except that’s more like saying that lopping off your head might make filing your own taxes problematic. For Davon Loeb, identity and family are the foundations...
Some Field Notes on Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003 – 2018 by Kathy Fish (in Randomized Order) Published by Matter Press
Final Thought: Buy this Book. The Lines That Would Not Be Considered “Killer” But Are “Killer” Because They Are Not Necessarily “Killer”: “The man stretches his legs out. He mutes the television and chuckles. She thinks he muted the television to make sure she...
You Might Want to Get a Handjob from Rick Moranis: A Review of Madam Velvet’s Cabaret Of Oddities by Nancy Stohlman
I mean, possibly. Nothing’s beyond the conceivable, especially when Stohlman’s in the car. When she’s driving it, and it’s a clown car, and one of the clown’s in the upside down position “because Marty needs a break,” anything becomes possible (like fantasy handjobs...
Random-and-Oftentimes-Fabricated Statistics About Sad Laughter (Brian Alan Ellis), by Ryan Werner
(329) The number of times I thought “These were tweets, right?” (0) The number of times I actually went to Brian’s Twitter to check if these were tweets because, much like the aura and culture of literature are constantly pointed out to be in Sad Laughter, that would...
Three Men on the Edge by Michael Loveday; V. Press, U.K.
Everything explained? Boring. Linear plot? Boring. Long chapters? Boring. Three Men on the Edge by Michael Loveday? Not boring. This book—the first full-length flash collection from UK-based V. Press—takes us to the edge of traditional prose and veers into poetry....
Show Her A Flower by Peg Alford Pursell; Second Edition, WTAW Press
Ever focus so hard on a star that it disappears? The human eye’s anatomical constraints allow for only oblique attention to life’s wonders. The heart likewise skews in relation to life’s calamities. In her collection, Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, Peg Alford...
Bending Genres Q & A with author Lynn Mundell
Lynn Mundell attended our first Bending Genres retreat at Synergia Ranch, outside of Santa Fe last September. We asked Lynn six questions about her experience at the retreat and her writing: What went into the decision to attend the Synergia Ranch September 2017...
Kiss, Kiss by Paul Beckman, Truth Serum Press
It’s not especially shocking to find a teenaged narrator playing strip poker with his elderly babysitter in Paul Beckman’s latest flash fiction collection, Kiss Kiss. In fact, that kid is probably better off than the boy who finds his brothers waiting to kill the...
I Don’t Know About You But by Kara Vernor
I Don’t Know About You But by Kara Vernor, [A Craft Essay] I read and write because it’s cheaper than travelling and the second best way I know to surprise myself and feel something new. To remind myself that my daily trappings—showering, running my face through a...
The Expanse Between by Lee L. Krecklow, Winter Goose Publishing
Wisconsinite Lee L. Krecklow's novel raises interesting questions about storytelling and ethics. He pits the “I saw it, I own it” social media mindset vs individual privacy rights. Thomas Stone, a reclusive writer whose early success never gained traction, is...
A Report on Reports by Brian Evenson (The Cupboard, 2018)
A Report on Reports by Brian Evenson (The Cupboard, 2018) by Jonathan Cardew I was going to write a report on Reports by Brian Evenson—and I still am, it’s still happening right now—but I must admit to a little bit of trepidation in doing so....
All The Ghosts We’ve Always Had by Jules Archer, Thirty West Publishing, 2018
All the Ghosts We’ve Always Had by Jules Archer, Thirty West Publishing House, 2018 By Robert Scotellaro Here is a gutsy mosaic of moments. Moments masterfully and poetically rendered. Authentic travels through growth and living. Of family fractures and survival....
We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida, New Stories from a Sinking Peninsula, edited by Shane Hinton, Burrow Press, 2017
We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida, New Stories from a Sinking Peninsula, edited by Shane Hinton, Burrow Press, 2017 by Jennifer Fliss Burrow Press has curated a collection as weird, wacky, and diverse as that southern spongey mass of terrain and people… in a good...
Plots Are For Dead People by Jacqueline Doyle
PLOTS ARE FOR DEAD PEOPLE Jacqueline Doyle Who knows what attracted me to flash ten years ago? I hate following rules, for one thing, and as far as I could see it was a genre without rules. Within the maximum word count, anything was possible. My first flash was a...
Other Household Toxins by Christopher Allen, Matter Press, 2018
A collage review of Christopher Allen's Other Household Toxins by April Bradley (in author Allen’s own words) Waves like they fathered the tides: “My world is not broken. My world is not broken.” Freaks to Lynn are portents, stunned by the big dumb beauty of men...