Author: Heavy Feather

An Impossible Love, a novel by Christine Angot, reviewed by Titus Chalk

Christine Angot’s latest novel to appear in English, An Impossible Love, is an elusive read. Slippery to pin down in terms of its genre, the story also transforms in our hands after a pivotal reveal recontextualizes everything that comes before it. Not only the story’s content, but Angot’s aesthetic, too. Without wanting to give too…
Side A Flash Fiction: “Causality” by Anita Goveas

Causality When my placid younger brother scalded himself on his sixth birthday, the first time he ever cried, my mother declared it was inevitable and cultivated a hobby of having accidents. She could no longer touch a newspaper or our dog-eared copy of 1001 Nights without a papercut that rendered her helpless and table legs…
“Maggie Siebert’s Dead Kitten as the Persecution of Consciousness by Reality’s Imitation of Eternity”: Charlene Elsby’s Review of Bonding

“Every Day for the Rest of Your Life” is the final story in Maggie Siebert’s Bonding, and it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t leave you, because it elucidates something fundamental to the persistence of the terrible—a fundamental premise we know to be true, but which isn’t made explicit except by madmen and metaphysicians. Maggie…
Sift, a new poetry collection by Christian Hawkey, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

The cover for Christian Hawkey’s first collection of poetry, The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004), features a stuffed, anthropomorphized duck standing on the edge of a bed and staring blankly at itself in a mirror. Tinged in an orange glow, the cover is quite uncanny, since we as viewers are led to see ourselves…
“Ghost Town,” a Haunted Passages Short Story by Chris George

We stayed in the van while our mom gave the ghost tour. These nights scared my sisters. They didn’t believe in ghosts. One of them had told me once that they were staunch materialists. They were precocious, having an otherworldly knowledge of things they shouldn’t know. It was child’s play stoicism. But these nights they…
The Employees, a workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, reviewed by Titus Chalk

Powerful men like to send things into space. Perhaps the darkness between the stars is the proximity to godliness they seek. Perhaps they want simply to untether themselves from Earth and its trifling concerns like workers’ rights. There is something of both these ideas in Olga Ravn’s latest novel, published in Danish in 2018, before…
Master of Rods and Strings, Jason Marc Harris’ debut novella, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

“The life of puppets […] is the dance of the fingers. Puppeteers of old—they say—would connect wires from their veins, feeding lifeblood to puppets to entice the spirits of the earth to enter them. Today, we do this with strings. You move, like so, and he moves. A thing is dead until it moves. You…
Side A: “the cinder path,” a poem by Zach Savich

the cinder path harder to writemyself a noteon the back of the eulogythan the eulogyit takes a long timeto tune and longerto trust sometimesthe captions say“[gentle minor melody]”sometimes “[windactivates the motionalarm]” the fantasyat thirty-nineis a hamburger inthe parking lot by the squatlighthouse scrap beachif you touch me herebelow the throatit smells of rainthere isn’t roomon…
How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children, a poetry collection by Quincy Scott Jones, reviewed by teri elam

How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children, Quincy Scott Jones’ poetry collection, crawls into the bloodstream, lays in wait, inching up the heat. His is an in-your-face look at race and culture, as much eulogy as history lesson, as much elegy as admonition. Jones, incinerator and extinguisher, understands the assignment he has given, coaxing…