Author: Heavy Feather
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Bald New World, a novel by Peter Tieryas Liu, reviewed by Simon Han
Like José Saramago’s Blindness or George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Peter Tieryas Liu’s science-fiction novel, Bald New World, is a story involving a plague that isn’t about the plague. And yet it is the plague that may draw you in at first, as it did for me. Overnight, everyone in the world goes…
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Dan Townsend on Between Wrecks, new short fiction by George Singleton
I’ve read almost all of George Singleton’s books. His novel Workshirts for Madmen is the best thing I’ve read about overcoming addiction. His stories have been published everywhere. One time I sent him an e-mail telling him how great I thought he was. I’d been drinking. And yet Singleton gets the labels. He’s a regionalist.…
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The Lucky Body, stories by Kyle Coma-Thompson, reviewed by Alex McElroy
To create, an author must abolish her body. As the author writes the body dissolves, ages, atrophies in its chair, and the resulting text, though cognitively enhancing, cannot replenish the cells lost during the act of writing. Perhaps this is why authors call what they make a body of work, a corpus, that—if we are…
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By Light We Knew Our Names, stories by Anne Valente, reviewed by Erin Flanagan
Anne Valente’s first collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, offers up thirteen unique stories dealing with the difficult transitions from childhood to adulthood, the mystery of connection, the hardships of loss, and the crystalized moments when wonder is either abandoned or embraced. Many of the stories contain magical elements and could be classified as…
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I Am Currently Working on a Novel, seventy-five stories by Rolli, reviewed by Adam Thomlison
The seventy-five stories in mononymous author Rolli’s new flash-fiction collection, I Am Currently Working on a Novel, waver between whimsical and bleak. The best ones are both. The stories are all bizarre in one way or another, and sitting down to this book feels much like one of those caffeine dreams that is a rapid…
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What Happened Here, short stories by Bonnie ZoBell, reviewed by Kelsie Hahn
The stories in Bonnie ZoBell’s What Happened Here are linked by place, all tied to the San Diego community of North Park. The community was made famous by a terrible airplane accident in the 1970s that ended with a passenger plane crashing into the streets of the neighborhood, scattering both mechanical and human debris. This…
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“Len Joy’s Debut Novel American Past Time Reflects Small Town America in the Mid-twentieth Century” by Gay Degani
“They cruised down Main Street, past the Tastee-Freeze and Dabney’s Esso Station and the Post Office and the First National Bank of Maple Springs and Crutchfield’s General Store. At the town’s only traffic light, he turned left toward the highway. At the edge of town they passed the colored Baptist Church with its nearly-tended grid…
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The Blast, a novella by David Ohle, reviewed by Nick Francis Potter
It is not without merit that David Ohle’s last name rhymes with “holy.” For all intents and purposes, Ohle is the patron saint of a kind of psycho-dystopian absurdity that is at once brutal, hilarious, and weird. Sainthood, however, has been late in coming for Ohle. His first novel, Motorman, first published by the venerable…
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“How You Get That Way?”: Candice Wuehle on the Ultravacant Poetics of Lana Del Rey
Lana Del Rey is a smart artist, a self-styled “gangster Nancy Sinatra.” She references Whitman, Plath, the Beats; wears and sings about heart-shaped sunglass as though she herself is a vintage cover (sonically, visually, textually) of Lolita. But it’s really only on her unreleased songs that she also sings about the murderous dark side of…
Heavy Feather Review 