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In this collection of twenty-five short stories, Brian Doyle takes his readers on a roller-coaster ride through social issues, politics, war, religion, mortality, and morality and shares his beliefs as an Irish, Catholic, devoted husband and father as openly here as he does in his nonfiction. Readers familiar with Doyle’s work will recognize the playful prose and rhythmic sentences, which the writer has tailored in tone and content to match each character’s persona, while a charming, unnamable oddness chuckles over the entire collection. Doyle doesn’t tell his readers what or how to think; rather, he simply asks us to follow him like the Pied Piper and watch as he drills down to the marrow of something, where he almost invariably finds a shred of hope. Continue reading “Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories”

In her first book, Piano Rats, Franki Elliot gives the world a glimpse inside her life as she recounts scenes of her past and the other characters inside them. With a writing style that’s blunt, honest, and beautiful, she wins readers over as someone who’s easy to relate to—someone else who’s felt messed up or like they have messed up, or someone who’s been in love or fallen out of it. Continue reading “Piano Rats”

Annam Manthiram’s first novel, After the Tsunami, a finalist in the 2010 Stephen F. Austin State University Press Fiction Contest, is a powerful story of endurance but also a disturbing picture of an orphanage for boys in India. The inspirations for this novel were first, the experiences of the author’s two elder sisters in a boarding school and secondly, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In this novel, the boys had either lost their parents in the tsunami or were abandoned by living parents. Since the orphanage’s “Mothers” were so arbitrarily brutal, the boys had to bond to survive, but their shifting alliances also had consequences. Siddhartha, the narrator, a successful teacher in the U.S. with a loving family, is haunted by what happened to his friends and what he did himself to add to the brutality in the “House.” Continue reading “After the Tsunami”

The Hermit shows us Laura Solomon’s self-reflexive speaker, a poet who has lived much of her life sending more love letters to the world than she has received from it. In poem after poem of her third book, the poet-speaker illustrates the loneliness, anxiety, and doubt she has endured while living through words, whose meanings have weathered time. The problem she has had, we imagine, is with written language itself—“in the dream you are becoming / don’t become just words / one more person for whom love prefers / words to other people” (“Dream Ear III”). It seems the words she inks from memory cannot stay fixed. Even though remembered experience does not yellow like paper, it undergoes significant alterations—people change into shadows of their former selves, cities decay and get restored and decay again, and places once important to us drift into our peripheries. We imagine that another problem she has must be with the slipperiness of written language, its phenomenological deficiencies. Particular experience falls through the gaps left between the sentences she writes. As with infatuation, the good feeling that surges through us while in the flow of writing is short-lived. We each know something about how this goes, but most of us shrug when we ask ourselves how a poet might express such frustration. Solomon does so by writing poems that get at how her romantic relationship with the world—its people, places, things and valences—has matured and, as a result, taken up a more realistic position regarding written language and its possibilities. Continue reading “The Hermit”

Daniel Bullen delivers an intimate account of five artist-couples whose relationships stepped outside of the status quo of the times in which they lived. He admits that his interest in the subject is personal. In writing this book he was “looking for the language to reconcile marriage and desire.” Any long-lasting intimate relationship of significance is bound to be a tricky endeavor—prone to be often full of mishaps, some a matter of chance, others deliberately pursued. Bullen’s book is more concerned with the latter; the individuals in these relationships each pursue multiple lovers, leading to hopelessly complicated love lives. Continue reading “The Love Lives of the Artists”

Brian Evenson’s latest collection toes the line between genre and so-called literary fiction and between a recognizable world and new dimensions. Those familiar with his previous work won’t be surprised, as Evenson frequently does this; however, this certainly isn’t a run-of-the-mill collection. Continue reading “Windeye”

The Story of Buddha: A Graphic Biography plots the Buddha’s journey from crown prince of the ??kya kingdom to Enlightenment as a reformed ascetic, as told and illustrated by Hisashi Ota. It’s a story not often heard outside the studies of practicing Buddhists or lectures on World Religion, but it is key for even a basic understanding of Buddhism, the religion based on Buddha Sakyamuni’s teachings. Continue reading “The Story of Buddha”

I’ve been dipping into Joe Wilkins’ Killing the Murnion Dogs all month like a box of Russell Stover’s candy. Unlike the box of chocolates, I haven’t picked a bad piece. Every poem is a little gem, like your favorite chocolate, not sweet but revelatory and exciting as it delivers moments of loss and gain. Continue reading “Killing the Murnion Dogs”

Readers who love word play, such as puns, and prefer a nonlinear structure for the surprises it brings will find prize-winning Scottish novelist Ali Smith’s There But For The amusing and insightful. Continue reading “There But for The”

The old adage, good things come in small packages, rolls off the tongue easily during times when economy is in fashion: smaller cars, tighter budgets, and fuel-efficient homes. Lately, the scarcity I feel regards time. So when a batch of uncorrected proofs of lyrical shorts arrived in the mail, I thrilled at the brevity of their roughly 7 x 5 inch shape, the ample white space on the pages, and the thin way they slid into my purse, at the ready for checkout lines, dentist chairs, and half-hour lunch breaks. This month, I’ve come to understand that good writing comes in small packages, and that a mere few lines can pack a potent narrative punch. Continue reading “Darling Endangered”

As its name might suggest, Karen Carcia’s On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing explores the periphery of awareness: objects unseen, things unsaid, and events forgotten. Like a crooked tree, the chapbook depends upon what isn’t there as much as what is, achieving its own wholeness and balance. Continue reading “On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing”

This is a trippy little book. A biographical note in the back describes Macé’s writings as “unclassifiable texts that cross the lines between poem, essay, dream, biography, literary criticism, anthropology, and history.” This is as good a list of summary descriptors for this book that’s to be found; Macé covers all these areas. It’s a unique object of curiosity. Continue reading “The Last of the Egyptians”

Stephen Beachy’s novel Boneyard is different, even original. Appealing perhaps to a younger readership, the book shows a young man’s revolt against the Amish community he came from, as well as against the outside world. It parts ways with the usual sentimentalized picture of Amish society (like in Beverly Lewis’ novels). It is also different in including the author and his editor battling with each other as part of the story—and that battle in interesting footnotes! Lyrical in parts, Boneyard depicts a young man’s dark fantasies that evolve and transform right up to the end. Clearly Beachy is questioning how much of reality we can know in fiction. Continue reading “Boneyard”

There is still so much surprise to be had in “old” age. In the title poem of The Joy of the Nearly Old, Rosalind Brackenbury writes of a dying poet, “poetry / changes nothing in the world, / only poetry. But poetry, he told me, / is everything.” In Brackenbury’s world, the poem is the oasis. Viewing life as an extended poem, one unendingly upbeat though not without its share of obstacles, is one way the poet’s speaker continues to find surprise in “nearly old” age. Death is inevitably sprinkled throughout the pages of a book about aging, waving to us from over the brink, but sadness remains largely buried under the surface of these poems, particularly those about death. Even death is not so daunting; it is always met with optimism, as after all it has only “terrier jaws.” The Joy of the Nearly Old is minimal in structure—short lines compose short poems; syntax and diction are simple and airy—but it is only deceptively minimal in idea. To say it plainly, the poet makes writing poignant poems—the kind that sting like bees and are gone before you know what has happened—look easy. In these poems, small things physically fill big spaces, and the same is figuratively true of Brackenbury’s writing prowess. Continue reading “The Joy of the Nearly Old”

The idea of completely understanding the processes of any revolutionary change is daunting—to say nothing of making sense of its cultural and historical contexts. In the historic waves of North American feminist theory and practices, the respective paradigms of feminism shift, evolve, and ultimately normalize along lines of particular intellectual circles and politically historic movements. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the first convention for women’s rights and suffrage in 1848, for example, show a completely different, and seemingly unparalleled, cultural milieu than a feminist theorist like twenty-first century philosopher Judith Butler. Both women, however, illustrate a “revolutionary context” for understanding a broader feminist identity, however constructed—both show the powerful effects of change within particular societal circumstances. In Writing the Revolution: The Feminist History Project’s Collected Columns of Michele Landsberg, Canadian writer, social activist, and ardent feminist Michele Landsberg reminds us that beyond any of the historical feminist revolutions are the people of the revolutions—women and their narratives. From Landsberg’s columns, we get the sense that she finds feminism on the ground, in everyday life, to be the centering force that keeps the falcon of feminist theory from circling out in a wider and wider gyre of culture. Continue reading “Writing the Revolution”

In Panic Attack, USA, the debut collection of poetry by Nate Slawson, the poems rush full speed with wounded but open hearts into the wild and unpredictable future. “I call my heart Megaphone,” a speaker claims in the poem “July 4,” “because I sometimes feel / epic when I feel / with my complete circulatory / system.” Each poem in the collection seems to have speakers with these megaphone hearts, speakers who feel epic when feeling, who have the volume cranked to eleven 24/7. Continue reading “Panic Attack, USA”

The first section of Spring, by British writer David Szalay, has the feel of listening to a clueless college pal heading for another romantic train wreck. An inscrutable, perhaps capricious woman becomes the blank screen on which he paints his own meanings. James, now in his mid-thirties, is no longer a hipster entrepreneur, having already gained and lost a fortune in the volatile economics of the dot-com world. He is bright and wounded and seems to choose cluelessness in a willful way. He ruminates about his downsized life expectations: Continue reading “Spring”

The title to Garrett Socol’s fiction book, Gathered Here Together, at first may be reminiscent of the phrase shared at the beginning of a wedding ceremony, but as soon as you dive into the first few stories, it is clear that the people are gathered for funerals. In fact, the short story from which the book gets its title is a story about a woman flying home for the funeral of her best friend. The tie that links the collection together is the theme of death; even when you think it is going to be a great love story, death creeps up, just as death creeps up on us in real life. The book explores the different ways that death, the fear of death, or the consequences of death can turn life in new directions. Continue reading “Gathered Here Together”

In a series of before-and-after poems, Amal al-Jubouri describes the changes in day-to-day action and mood in Baghdad and greater Iraq after the invasion by American forces and the fall of the Ba’ath Party in 2003. Continue reading “Hagar Before the Occupation Hagar After the Occupation”