Author: Heavy Feather
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Fiction: Matthew Dexter’s “The Ant Colony”
Charles climbs the hill above fat camp and watches the children running between orange cones on the manicured lawns, tiny as insects, limbs jiggling in slow-motion, coaches and counselors screaming obscenities through their megaphones. Fire ants climb Charles’ socks, sting the blond hairs above his ankles. He brushes them from the elastic, slaps them dead…
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Graphic Novel Review: Ryan Werner Reads The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found by J. Roselló
*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. The titular Well-Dressed Bear of J. Roselló’s The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found doesn’t seem to ever finish reading his copy of Italo Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler. I myself read it almost a decade ago and remember almost nothing of it: ten…
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Book Review: John Vanderslice on Ben Tanzer’s Story Collection Sex and Death
With a title as provocatively Freudian as Sex and Death, a reader might expect a book of stories that never ends, or one that encapsulates the life of every person who has ever existed on the planet. Well, a concise, easily portable collection like this one (a mere seventy-two pages long) from Ben Tanzer is…
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Waste, a novel by Andrew F. Sullivan, reviewed by Robyn Ringler
Waste is a rapid-action unconventional novel that takes place over two days in 1989 in the fictional and economically dying town of Larkhill in southern Ontario, Canada. Larkhill is lined by porn stores, discount tax offices, and apartments patched with plywood windows. The twelve manufacturing plants that used to provide jobs are now gray lots…
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Fiction Review: Mindy Hartings Reads Gisele Firmino’s The Marble Army
Brazil and America might appear to have many differences—language, development, and location. However, at one time, America and Brazil were both colonies fighting off the suppressor to gain freedom of speech and assembly. The Marble Army by Gisele Firmino eliminates all predisposed differences, so the reader can relate to these characters from across the globe…
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Fiction: Jamie Iredell’s “Killing the Sax”
The Fat Kid and the Fat Kid’s daddy and the Fat Kid’s buddies sat at the bar watching the football game when the saxophone came in. Nick said, Aw, fuck. Cooter grunted. They all shifted a barstool toward the Pabst clock, toward the television, hoping the saxophone wouldn’t start blowing. Their hopes dashed, for that’s…
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United States of Japan, a novel by Peter Tieryas, reviewed by Nick Sweeney
We owe Philip K. Dick a lot. With every sentence he wrote, Dick helped many writers and readers break through the doors of imagination and ask “what if?” He made us think, and he sparked a new generation of writers to jump high, write fast, and explain things later. Dick, in many ways, has influenced…
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Nothing but the Dead and Dying, stories by Ryan W. Bradley, reviewed by Leland Cheuk
The title of Ryan W. Bradley’s eighth book, Nothing but the Dead and Dying, pulls no punches. Set in Alaska, these two-dozen stories are about a dead and dying part of the world, thanks to climate change, and the dead and dying white working class men that have become a media talking point in this…
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Fiction: Michael Sheehan’s “I Love You Like This Because I Don’t Know Any Other Way to Love”
The TV said the bombing was claimed by the Taliban, who’d convinced the informant—a man, a doctor, a father—to kill himself for the greater good of killing high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials who believed he was on their side, a Taliban supporter turned CIA aide, though in truth he was a triple agent, as the TV…
Heavy Feather Review 