Author: Heavy Feather

Review: Zachary Kocanda on Amateurs, a novel by Dylan Hicks

Amateurs, the sophomore novel by Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter and novelist Dylan Hicks, is about the consequences of shooting for the moon—or at least the New York Times Best Sellers list. A twenty-first-century novel of manners in the Austenian tradition, Amateurs spans the mid-to-late aughts, and after a short prologue, its sections are structured as prenuptial and…
Poetry Review: Mike McClelland on John McCarthy’s Ghost County

Don’t be deceived by John McCarthy’s debut collection, Ghost County. The book’s slim size and meticulous organization can lull the unguarded reader into thinking that they are in for a quick indulgence, a one-sitting flick through a stereoscopic tour of the American Midwest. The imagery is well-rendered but familiar, and emotion is referenced, but the narration…
Poetry Review: Jasmine An on The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo Kwa Mei-en

…In this book, the bees make money in the lion’s fontanel, licked away by the heroin tacky sheets of zero Next chapter in, we girls spit it all out. The end is gold and harm mercurial, and the sea, ashine withmilk and honey, and the sky, amen. In these poems, Lo Kwa Mei-en constructs an…
Fiction: David Tomaloff’s “The Brother Pact”

On this day we find a brother. This brother is a brother in a bathtub quietly bathing. An unlocked door on the second story & a window open to the smell of a father pressing cheap cuts into a charred black grill. We find also on this day this brother’s brother. A one-boy militia, this…
Fiction Review: Christopher Lura Reads Graham Guest’s Winter Park

Winter Park opens on an airplane flown by a pilot who says things like “scone be bumpy” and a main character who, while tossing back a couple of “G&T’s,” notes proudly to the reader that he is a philosopher. It’s an entry that gives us several clues about what kind of book is awaiting: we…
Book Review: Paul Albano on Matthew Griffin’s Debut Novel Hide

Hide, Matthew Griffin’s tender, funny, and engrossing debut novel, is a love story. But an odd love story, a sort of alchemy between the sturdy, old-fashioned mores of the Greatest Generation, and the newfangled deconstruction, or at least complication of those mores, that frequently mark contemporary literature. The lovers are Wendell Wilson and Frank Clifton,…
Novella Review: Ryan Werner Reads Dan Mancilla’s The Deathmask of El Gaucho

I would assume that writing about professional wrestling is infinitely harder than writing professional wrestling itself. The conceit of wrestling is a simple one, one person saying to another You have caused me personal and/or professional strife and I wish to rectify that within the parameters of a wrestling match. The performances are where the…
Insignificana, stories by Dolan Morgan, reviewed by Tyler Barton

Think Kafka for the absurdism, for the nihilistic subjects. Think Lydia Davis for the story-as-grammatical-game. Think of the pranksterism of Michael Martone. Think of your favorite conspiracy theory, your favorite washed-up actor. If you like what you’re thinking about, you should read Insignficana by Dolan Morgan. No, wait. There are other reasons. Read it for…
The Folly of Loving Life, short story collection by Monica Drake, reviewed by Laura Citino

The story of a city is really the story of the people who live there. In one sense, Monica Drake’s collection of linked stories, The Folly of Loving Life, is the story of Portland, Oregon, a city that looms large in the cultural imagination as a kind of well-meaning joke. The collection may end in…