Author: Heavy Feather

“Friday Was the Bomb”: An Interview with Nathan Deuel

Nathan Deuel’s new book Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East (Dzanc Books) is a memoir about raising his young daughter in the Middle East—living in Riyadh, Istanbul, and then Beirut—while his wife, Kelly McEvers, worked throughout the region as a war correspondent and eventually NPR’s Baghdad Bureau chief. Amid the chaos…
Beside Myself, stories by Ashley Farmer, reviewed by James R. Gapinski

Ashley Farmer’s Beside Myself has plenty of surreal imagery and an accelerated pace, but the collection feels oddly calm. It’s a book about introspection rather than bombshell plot twists. The characters are constantly turning the narrative inward, and there’s a sense of nostalgic distance in many stories—the kind of clarity that comes with time. Consider…
What Came Before, a novel by Gay Degani, reviewed by Len Kuntz

Within the first two paragraphs of Gay Degani’s novel, What Came Before, the reader is thrust into a story that sizzles: I can’t run. Can’t breathe. Dry kernels blow through my lips. I wake up sweating, legs tangled in sheets, eyes gritty, mouth dry, my brain jammed together like frozen broccoli. I rattle my head…
Last Word, a novella by Jonathan Blum, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

Set against the backdrop of changing technologies, cyber-bullying, and blended families, Jonathan Blum’s novella Last Word tells of Kip Langer and his son, Eric, as Kip attempts to understand a boy connected to him by blood and little else. Facing both a civil liberty negligence suit and his thirteen-year-old son’s expulsion from his Jewish middle…
Travel Notes, an episodic novel by Stanley Crawford, reviewed by Dan Townsend

I. On the surface, Travel Notes by Stanley Crawford is glib satire, in line with Catch-22 or Vonnegut’s Slapstick. The novel is episodic, owing to the tradition of the farcical travelogue. Promotional materials compare the story to a “fever dream”. I’m not sure what that means, fortunate as I’ve been never to have had a fever…
Contributors’ Corner: Justin Hamm

Welcome to our new interview series, “Contributors’ Corner,” where we open the floor each week to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Justin Hamm, whose three stories appear in HFR 3.3. Justin Hamm is the founding editor of the museum of americana and the author of the chapbooks Illinois, My Apologies…
[Sic], a Dead/Book plagiarism by Davis Schneiderman, reviewed by Paul Albano

Davis Schneiderman’s writing is typically propelled by a kind of palpable kinetic energy—an explosive proliferation of images, concepts, ideas, and well … words that collide and intersect in the strangest of ways. This is most evident in his 2010 novel Drain, set in the desiccated basin of what used to be Lake Michigan, amidst a…
Nick Kocz on Nine Rabbits, an autobiographical novel by Virginia Zaharieva (trans. Angela Rodel)

Manda, Virginia Zaharieva’s fictional alter-ego in her intensely autobiographical first novel, Nine Rabbits, leads the kind of wild, globe-trotting life that would make most people envious. A successful poet, magazine publisher, television and radio personality, mother, and psychoanalyst, she’s dogged throughout her life by the abuse she suffered as a young girl at the hands…
Hill William, a new novel by Scott McClanahan, reviewed by Thomas Baughman

Scott McClanahan is one of the rising stars of the Indie Lit World. He has published several story collections and his novel-in-stories, Crapalachia: A Biography of Place has received considerable praise from reviewers. Now he has published his second novel, which is also a novel-in-stories, which I was excited to read and am now proud…