Author: Heavy Feather

Review by Joe Sacksteder: Mount Fugue, a hybrid novel by JI Daniels

As a pianist who has played many a fugue in my time, I’m sometimes annoyed at the default the corollary many critiques draw between difficult works of literature and the fugue. The “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses, for example, is not fugal. It’s more of a bloated overture with the opening section representing the instrumentalists warming…
“Stranger Territories”: Matthew Phipps Reviews Jen George’s The Babysitter at Rest

The Babysitter at Rest, Jen George’s audaciously good debut collection of fiction, opens, significantly, on the occasion of a birthday. At the beginning of the first story, “Guidance / The Party,” the unnamed narrator, newly thirty-three, is visited by a figure she only knows as The Guide. Spectral and robed, of indeterminate gender, The Guide…
Gabino Iglesias Reviews The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan

An interesting thing happened in literature recently, and not for the first time. Most readers were looking at Big Five publishers and waiting for something written by someone in New York that resembled the next great American novel. Meanwhile, readers plugged into Tyrant Books, one of the best indie publishers in the world, were reading…
Fiction: Deena ElGenaidi’s “Attached”

Alison had gotten attached and couldn’t move, her body sticky, like someone had super glued her to the bed, to the sheets that smelled of laundry detergent, smelled like him. She tried to sit up but felt like if she lifted her body, her skin might peel right off, sticking to the sheets, leaving her…
Two Poems by Jennifer Conlon

Menagerie of Sexual Assault Fish have evolved to have four different types of mouth based on their feeding habits. * Disgusting animal. * The four types are terminal, superior, inferior, and protrusible. The 45th man to preside our country has a mouth type somewhere between inferior and protrusible. * I just start kissing them. It’s…
Fiction: Nick Kocz’s “How It Ends”

Under the radar was how Cole Wilkinson flew, publishing a second-tier alt-right news site that was all but unknown to those cucks who followed only mainstream media sources. However, in the year after he urged his readers to elect a narcissistic sociopath to the presidency, the website grew in popularity, almost overnight becoming fringe conservatives’…
Poetry: Jeanette Beebe’s “The Pallbearers”

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being—you know, shot. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?” —Donald Trump on Fox News, May 2016 As Kennedy was laid to rest in Washington with…
Side A Featured Essay: “Mercantile” by Jennifer Fliss

I am in a store that calls itself a mercantile. The floors are a bleached wood. It smells like patchouli with an overlay of dryer sheets. There’s a vast selection of essential oils. I smell them all until I smell them all as I move to the back of the store. I run my fingers…
Review: Robert Young on Han Yujoo’s Novel The Impossible Fairy Tale

If there’s one word that can be used to describe Han Yujoo’s novel, The Impossible Fairy Tale, it would be unique. Yujoo’s first novel published in English by Graywolf Press is a tour de force and totally unlike anything I’ve ever read before. The world of The Impossible Fairy Tale is dreamlike, and the way that…