Author: Heavy Feather
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Fiction: Patrick Kelling’s “78 Facts About a Resident of Wabash Landing”
1. You change the side you’re sleeping on only when you feel the mattress folding around you. 2. In the fall you fish for spiders that may be living in your Sorels. 3. In the summer you bathe in the lake. 4. The first car you owned was a ’sixty-four Beatle that never started twice…
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Fiction Review: Eric Nguyen Reads Sequoia Nagamatsu’s Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone
The fantastical has long been a part of American literature. From Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to the magical realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved—fantasy is American and its type of fantasy distinctly so. But today’s fantastical literature is different from what has come before. Writing for Electric Literature, author Amber Sparks dubs this…
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Fiction Review: Gint Aras Reads Nakamura Reality by Alex Austin
I am far from an expert on Japanese culture. While I’ve not yet had the chance to visit Japan, I have always been drawn to the aesthetics and themes in Japanese art, have felt a certain magnetism from Japan, and admire several Japanese writers, among them Natsume Soseki and Kenzaburo Oe. I also practice Zen in my…
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Fiction: Excerpt from Knotty, Knotty, Knotty by Joshua Kornreich
You could hear it buzzing throughout the house. It was a small house, our house. It had an upstairs and a downstairs, but it was a small house, regardless. You could hear any sound from any room inside the house if you listened hard enough. The nanny’s girl couldn’t hear jack no matter hard she…
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Nonfiction Review: Georgia Knapp on How I See the Humans by Gretchen VanWormer
In her essay “The Moths” Gretchen VanWormer states that she has a “tendency to see everything as a metaphor.” Throughout How I See the Humans, VanWormer expertly delivers on this statement with layers upon layers of deep, carefully crafted metaphors. Some of the metaphors are obvious: bat guano stands for the shit coursing through a…
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Fiction Review: R. Loveeachother Reads Davis Schneiderman’s Conceptual Novel INK.
Is this a riff on a Pollock drip painting? Is this a Rorschach test in ink splatters, rather than blots? A satire? A graphic novel? None? All? This concept novel aggressively resists review and conventional classification. What it is—or is not—INK. won’t say. Or, maybe it will, but certainly not on typical narrative terms. Disrupting…
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Six Poems from Leafmold: F. Daniel Rzicznek
The purpose of fishing is to get healthy. Why I dream and dream of oral thrush is beside any point. A gray-templed monk knelt and swept the colored sands away with one stroke. I could see a man dancing, bleeding, chanting beneath dimmed light and I immediately had a seizure and worst of all spilt…
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Fiction Review: Meghan Phillips Reads Your Sick by Elizabeth Colen, Carol Guess, & Kelly Magee
The title of Elizabeth Colen, Carol Guess, and Kelly Magee’s collaborative story collection, Your Sick, may at first seem like a grammatical error. In fact, a Goodreads user on the collection’s page asks, “Is the title intended to be ungrammatical? Are we supposed to read it as ‘You’re Sick?’” The confusion inherent in this question,…
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Daniel Falatko’s Condominium Blog Tour: Top Five
It probably says a lot about Condominium that none of the top five songs looming over the plot are by bands that ever existed. Whether this is an indicator of good things about the novel (“A cutting, surreal satire!”) or negative aspects (“What the hell is this thing even about?”) is up in the air,…
Heavy Feather Review 