Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction: Robert Duncan Gray’s “Helen”

Helen is dead. We used to have sex. We had three types of sex. The type of sex we had most often was mediocre sex. The type of sex we had second most often was bad sex. The type of sex we had very rarely was good sex. When we had good sex, it was…
Gods in Neon, stories by Sam Slaughter, reviewed by Greg Marzullo

An adult son abandons his paralyzed father for a splash of Old Crow. A young widower, self-medicating with a stream of drinks, crafts macabre stuffed rabbits for his autistic son. A businessman goes to Key West for a work meeting and, after a wave of several cocktails, tastes the wondrous and insane glory of his…
Fiction Review: Mike McClelland Reads Matthew Binder’s High in the Streets

Matthew Binder’s debut novel, High in the Streets, is a risky novel, containing many of the elements that most writers are told to (and, it must be said, probably should) avoid. Writing about writing? It’s here in abundance. Shrill, oversexualized female characters? Check! An aimless man-child for a protagonist? Yep. It takes great talent and…
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…
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…
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…