Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction Review: Jacob M. Appel on Seth Rogoff’s New Novel The Castle

Franz Kafka’s unfinished final novel, The Castle, stands out as the most sophisticated and elusive of the author’s abstruse and infinitely generous corpus. The enigmatic tale relates the tribulations of the land surveyor, K., summoned in error to a Central European village governed by the inept bureaucratic retainers of Count Westwest. A century after Kafka’s…
Fiction Review: Adam Camiolo Reads Douglas J. Penick’s Vikram-Vetala Retellings The Oceans of Cruelty

Oh great king, this world we traverse together is, as you know, a sea of cruel desires and insatiable deceits. Let me distract you with stories from another place and another time. The Oceans of Cruelty is a reinterpretation of the Sanskrit epic, the Vetala Panchavimshati, which spans twenty-five parables told within a framing narrative,…
Poetry for Flavor Town USA: “Exercise for Beginners” by Marc Janssen

Do people breathe differentlyWhen they are running in their dreams?I had a dog that would run in his sleep,His feet would quiver as he chased chipmunks up trees made of canine fantasy.Eyes movingScanning the inside of his lids. I wish there was a dreaming dietWhere I could run marathons while unconscious,And in the morning, wake…
“… and they were unafraid”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Roz Dineen’s Debut Novel Briefly Very Beautiful

In an apocalyptic world where fires ravage acre upon acre of land and the globe has entered a perpetually hot summer, a young mother struggles to make the correct decision about moving her children to one of the few unscathed remnants of countryside remaining. Meanwhile, the skies in the City turn orange with toxins, and…
Geoff Graser and K.E. Semmel Discuss His Novel The Book of Losman

The Book of Losman is the debut novel by K.E. Semmel, a writer and translator who lives in Scottsville, New York. Semmel tells the story of Daniel Losman, an American literary translator who has emigrated to Denmark. Losman is trying to discover the cause of his Tourette syndrome, and is willing to go to great…
New Haunted Passages Poem by Rachel Mallalieu: “If My Son Had Stayed Dead”

If my son had stayed dead,I would not have written the poemwhere my husband wailed my nameand I ran outside, to find him holding our baby whose skin was as blueas his eyes, as blue as the sky, as blue asthe shirt he wore that day. The poemwhere I grabbed my son and laid him…
Fiction Review: Vanessa Saunders Reads Annell López’s Collection I’ll Give You a Reason

Annell López’s first book, I’ll Give You A Reason, is masterclass in writing about people on the margins. The winner of the 2023 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize from Feminist Press, this short-story collection delves into themes of exclusion on the grounds of citizenship, race, and mental illness. Set in New Jersey, a haunting sense…
Two Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Newly Translated by Jefferey Samoray

Translator’s note: the originals of both poems were first published in the Apollinaire collection Le Guetteur mélancolique (The Melancholic Watchman). To the best of my knowledge, my translations represent their first appearance in English. Tristesse de l’Automne Vous êtes le soldat de toutes les bontésA vous voir la douleur tremble fuit et s’étonneVoyez votre départ…
Fiction Review: Hantian Zhang Reads Yuxin Zhao’s Novel The Moons

On the first page of The Moon: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog, Yuxin Zhao states her aesthetic outright: she values fragments more than structure, digression more than destination. The book can be read as a compilation of diary entries, scattered tiny life episodes ordered chronologically and grouped by zodiac signs. Together, in the space outlined…