Author: Heavy Feather

The Great Indoorsman, essays by Andrew Farkas, reviewed by Vincent James Perrone

There are too few champions of the indoors. The word itself has been sullied by incels and agoraphobes—malcontents and the discontented—connoting loneliness and isolation, despite its unassuming etymology. The indoors have languished in the cultural backwaters of nonfiction, pushed aside for the literally (literarily?) greener pastures of the travelogue, the naturalistic essay, and texts concerning…
Stories from the Attic, previously unpublished work by William Gay, reviewed by Dawn Major

After William Gay’s passing in 2012 a mountain of unpublished work was discovered and Team Gay—a group of artists, authors, professors, scholars, basically uber fans— was formed. I came into the picture while writing my master thesis in 2016 and I reached out to the archive for more in-depth information on Gay’s writing. After I…
“Crabgrass,” a new short story by Michael Cole for Haunted Passages

Diane woke calling out for someone, startled, in the same way that she would occasionally wake with a laugh, or even crying, embarrassed at the sharp blow of emotion dealt from a dream that was already fading. “Hello?” she said, still half asleep, chasing after a specter that had run a cold finger down her…
Anybody Home? a horror novel by Michael J. Seidlinger, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

It’s sometimes disturbing to think about the ways in which traditions evolve. Nothing, after all, starts out as a tradition. The word, by definition, carries in it the implicit understanding that an idea or act has happened a number of times, across a lengthy period, with some level of sustained intentionality. Human civilization functions around,…
Ancestral Throat, a chapbook of poems by Danny Rivera, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

“Dis–”, a prefix of negation, but also of an absence or removal, serves as the backdrop of Danny Rivera’s debut chapbook Ancestral Throat, an ecclesiastical elegy to his father and primal hymn to human origin. Discharged arias, dismantling chapters, discolored diaries, distended crowns, a dismissed choir: Rivera sings the pain of impermanence as the dying…
“If I Could Get By Without Sleep, I Would”: Tobias Carroll Discusses His New Novel, Ex-Members, with Ryan Sartor

When I think of the New York City literary scene, Tobias Carroll is right at the top of the list. He’s consistently championing writers, whether through his interviews at book launches around the city or as managing editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn, a vital source for all things literary fiction and nonfiction. I also just…
Flavor Town USA Poetry: “We Feed the Living” by Courtney LeBlanc

The week my father died I dugthrough the freezer and pantryin my parents’ house, pulled outthe ingredients to make my sister’sfavorite dessert. As I stirred and bakedI thought of my father, his body smallbut his hands swollen with edema.As the peanut butter cookies cooledon the counter, the sweet smell filledthe house, I stared out the…
In Memory of Memory, a novel by Maria Stepanova, reviewed by Sylwia Jurkowski

Organized chaos … or chaos that becomes slightly organized while the rest of it remains unbound. Surrealism’s allowance of the mind to wander into the illogical, to bathe in it, only to find the clear, unmistakable logic within. Let’s take the most basic definition of the word “memory” from Merriam-Webster, “the power or process of…
The Autodidacts, a novel by Thomas Kendall, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

There is a passage in what I have come to think of as, gun to my head, my all-time favorite novel—Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion—wherein a character complains to his therapist that he thinks he might be going mad, only to be met with the following response: “No Leland, not you. You, and in…