Author: Heavy Feather

“Living in a Lonely World”: Samuel Stolton Reads Leyna Krow’s I’m Fine, but You Appear to Be Sinking

If ever “reading” was to be considered a solitary enterprise, one is ironically sure to be acquainted with a fair few lonesome characters in Leyna Krow’s short story collection, I’m Fine, but You Appear to Be Sinking, published by Featherproof Books. An ominous sense of abandonment abounds throughout the stories, and the reader is immersed…
Fiction Review: Tyler Barton Reads Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World

The final story in Ottessa Moshfegh’s third book of fiction starts with the sentence, “I come from another place.” If Homesick for Another World contained an opening epigraph, this might be an apt one. To be clear, the collection is not a work of speculative fiction, nor is it sci-fi, fantasy, or even magical realism.…
James Ardis Reviews Exits by Daryl Seitchik

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. When I first heard about Daryl Seitchik’s comic Exits, the story of a woman who works at a mirror store until she achieves (or is cursed with) full invisibility, I felt confident I knew where the story would go. I figured Claire, the now invisible protagonist, would…
Two Poems by Linette Reeman

As Donald Trump Is Being Inaugurated a girl and i stagger out of a tear-cloud and shakeinto each others’ mouths. there is no one i loveout of necessity, but this is a love hatched undera sky bursting and marred by flames. a week later, the joke is still good. we started dating becausea riot bloomed…
Four Illustrations by Jon Read

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Smoke Signals Inside Fun Lake Mutant Love Mutant Attack A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Jon Read is a graduate of Kent State University. His style is influenced by visionary folk art and neo-expressionism. His paintings portray a strong narrative, telling stories heavily influenced by comic books, cult films,…
“I, Too, Am Ruining My Own Life”: Jesse Rice-Evans on Gwen Werner’s I’m Ruining My Own Life

Gwen Werner gets me: anxieties about gender, sexuality; being a total nihilist but loving my nest anyway; trying to not be an awful straight-passing feminist; surviving, but barely. Werner stumbles through life, but her voice is unwavering: she might hate herself, but she knows how to shape a story, and, maybe most importantly in short-form…
Four Poems by Katie Hibner

Smart Varmints You talk about how they’re smart varmints: they crawl out of a splintered helix,grow up crust-pluckingfor gratuities. They want to sic their reliquaries on ours,semantically blitzthrough our amber waves. They’re not cute and they’re not cubedbitesize;they gnaw on our breaded trade winds. You talk about howbots admit them through our firewalls,ignoring their flagrantly-laundered…
Fiction Review: Ray Barker Reads Alexander Boldizar’s The Ugly

Even courageous readers have likely never encountered a character with the overwhelming physical mass and intellectual presence of (northern) Siberian oaf, and oversized tribal chief, Muzhduk Ugli the Fourth. Muzhduk is the three-hundred-pound blond-bearded protagonist that propels Alexander Boldizar’s oddly unforgettable debut novel, The Ugly, to its fairytale end. The novel ostensibly details the life…
There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, stories by Michelle Ross, reviewed by Dana Diehl

The stories in Michelle Ross’ debut collection, aptly named There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, are fueled by grade school science, by snake venom, by fossilization, by velocity, by the kind of magic that’s real. Ross’ characters live in half-formed worlds, their vision limited by their circumstances. In these twenty-three stories, characters stare down…