Author: Heavy Feather

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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
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…