Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction Review: Jason K. Friedman Reads Devin Jacobsen’s Story Collection The Summer We Ate Off the China

The academy has long been suspicious of literary language, considering the very concept of a privileged mode of expression privileged in other ways: elitist, exclusionary. These days fiction writers seem to agree. If they aren’t in fact autofiction, the stories you read in, yes, elite literary publications mostly try to sound as if they’re just…
New Poetry by Delaney S. Saul: “You’ve Never Even Heard of Main Character Syndrome”

It’s the first Father’s Day since my dad died and I’m working at the mall. It’s been ten years since my psychotic break. I’m still recovering, even after all this time. Something I’ll always remember is how he came from out of town to drive me to the hospital. I could never tell him how…
Nonfiction Review: Alexandra Grabbe on Julie Masis’ Memoir How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe (And Survived the Holocaust in Ukraine)

At a moment in world history, when fascism seems to be rearing its ugly head again, the time feels right for yet another plunge into the past. Unfortunately, most people tend to forget what previous generations lived through. This is why I chose to read How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe (And Survived the Holocaust…
Fiction Review: Greta John Reads Maggie Armstrong’s Story Collection Old Romantics

Maggie Armstrong has described an “Old Romantic” as “a damn hapless fool who continually authors their own destruction by way of repeated mistakes and self-delusion.” While that may be a lovingly stern assessment of a romantic, like a woman talking to her naive best-friend, Armstrong argues her case in Old Romantics, because, well, you haven’t met…
“The Dilettante Magpie’s Guide to Research”: Natalie Louise Tombasco in Conversation with Poet Amie Whittemore

Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press), and the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared…
Short Story for Haunted Passages: “I Cut Her Out of Me” by D. Avern

The panel buildings, painted in all the colors of the rainbow, stood impassively amidst the oak forest. They soared several hundred meters high, as if trying to reach the clouds with their rooftops, equipped with helicopter landing pads—clouds shimmering with every hue of a watercolor palette, diluted in warm water and poured into the clear…
“Quotation Marks Are for Amateurs”: Matthew Kinlin in Conversation with James Nulick

From the venom-tongued Valencia to the hallucinatory The Moon Down to Earth, James Nulick writes novels about outsiders with the precision of a plastic surgeon and the phantasmagorial style of Marcel Proust reanimated in battery acid. His hypnotic and serpentine prose cumulates and reaches new heights in his latest novel Plastic Soul, a work of…
Poetry Review: Casper Orr Reads Bianca Rae Messinger’s Debut Collection pleasureis amiracle

Bianca Rae Messinger’s first full-length collection, pleasureis amiracle, explores the timelessness of memory and desire. While reading Messinger’s lyrical prose, I oftentimes found myself reading the poems aloud, nearly singing them. The musical quality of the poetry in pleasureis amiracle begs you and I to question the importance of sound in our lives. What does…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Nathan Dixon’s Story Collection Radical Red

I came to this book looking for right-wing horror. I wanted to giggle at the thing that freaks me out, instead of turning squeamishly away. Nathan Dixon has made up a cast of characters who recur from short story to short story in this collection. Some of them could probably be identified with real figures…