Author: Heavy Feather

The Fugue, a novel by Gint Aras, reviewed by Theodore Richards

One of the paradoxes of a writer’s life is that creating a novel is solitary experience that, if it is done with any degree of integrity, cannot avoid the interconnectedness of our world. We are in this together. A novel, like any work of art, is the product of the relationships of our lives. To tell…
Book Review: Amy Long on Bible Adventures, retrogaming nonfiction by Gabe Durham

When I was about eight or nine, I swore to God that I would read my entire Precious Moments Bible. Carrying the book to church on Christmas and Easter had always made me feel like a grownup; I’d press its white-leather cover against my chest the way TV teenagers held their schoolbooks and run my…
Fiction Review: Franklin Schneider Reads Over for Rockwell by Uzodinma Okehi

Put five writers together, and it won’t take them ten minutes to come to a consensus about why contemporary literature is so underwhelming. But read the books they’ve written and you’ll likely find that they’re guilty of every literary offense they just listed. There are many reasons for this—capitalism is one (i.e., the necessity of a marketable…
“What It Would Be Like to Fall”: A Conversation with Brian Evenson by Daniel Miller

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, including the forthcoming story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016). Coffee House Press will also be reissuing his American Library Association’s award-winning novel, Last Days, as well as two more novels: The Open Curtain and Father of Lies. He has translated…
Fiction Review: Ian Denning Reviews Margaret Malone’s People Like You

The title story of Margaret Malone’s debut collection begins with an unhappy married couple getting invited to a surprise party, getting lost on the way, and arguing in the car. Malone draws the argument out for longer than most writers would—three and a half pages of the couple snapping at each other for missing the…
“My Own Sad Little Kind of Prayer”: An Interview with Gregory Lawless by Jack Christian

The poems of Gregory Lawless’s Far Away (Red Mountain Press, 2015/Red Mountain Poetry Prize) all deal with various figurations of distance—distance as a bringer of insight, as a form of estrangement, and as a synonym of loss and uncertainty. As these poems rove over the ruined fields of northeastern Pennsylvania, we encounter a speaker who…
Three Poems by Gary Glauber

Found and Lost She was pasted firmly in the past,a trivial footnote in a weather-beaten journalgathering dust, unread on a high closet shelf,a brief coupling that held sweet silk memoriesbetween torrents of mood swings and accusations.She wore jealousy and lace, foolishly believingboth might strengthen a shaky relationship.It ended ugly, a paean to passion gone awry.Today…
The Mad Feast, an ecstatic food tour by Matthew Gavin Frank, reviewed by Vivian Wagner

Let me just say at the outset that The Mad Feast is a frenzied, delirious ride of a book. This collection of fifty essays travels around the country, through Matthew Gavin Frank’s mind, and into the nether regions of America’s culinary heritage. It’s an exploration of pleasure and sexuality, food and loss, slavery and cannibalism,…
Poetry Review: Sandra Hunter Reads Antidote for Night by Marsha de la O

Poetry is no easy way to understand why we are here on this planet; . . . A poet achieves the essential on the page, for a moment, and then that moment is gone. —Ilya Kaminsky: A Conversation, with Tatyana Mishel, Cranky Literary Journal As a UK transplant, I’ve lived in California since…