Category: Reviews & Criticism

Survival House, a story collection by Wendell Mayo, reviewed by Eric Aldrich

Survival House, a new collection of short fiction by Wendell Mayo, invites readers to experience the ironic fetishization of the Cold War in America. The collection blends compelling characters with borderline absurd imaginings of the Nuclear Age ethos. Mutually assured destruction hovers in the background as atomic diction is repurposed into dad jokes with a…
Not Everyone Is Special, Josh Denslow’s debut fiction collection, reviewed by Michael A. Ferro

If there’s one resounding message to be found in Josh Denslow’s debut collection of stories, Not Everyone Is Special, it’s just that: Not everyone is special, but enough people are and Denslow has created a world filled with winners, losers, and everyone in-between—each with their own engrossing stories and each told with the care and…
Sunsphere, a new story collection by Andrew Farkas, reviewed by Paul Albano

Sunsphere, Andrew Farkas’ second collection of experimental short stories (after his brilliant, and brilliantly named, Self-Titled Debut) is set in, around, and underneath Knoxville, TN. But not the Knoxville that exists in the collective hunch we recognize as reality. Instead, this is a surrealist rendering of the city—the Knoxville of our dreams and nightmares and…
Mannequin in the Nude, a poetry collection by Logan February, reviewed by Barton Smock

… My story was much too long, soI cut it to bits. —from Portrait of The Mannequin as my Brother … Forinstance, homoerotic. For instance, a boy who eats glass. —from Boy Lolita … When I died, I stopped trembling. Imagine a mechanicalboy being powered down. —from Ars Moriendi ~ With a lyric that pushes…
Vivian Wagner on Elizabeth A.I. Powell’s latest novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretations of J.Crew Catalogues

Elizabeth A.I. Powell’s new novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretations of J.Crew Catalogues, uses the worlds within and around the pages of J.Crew catalogues to imagine a convoluted story of desire, nostalgia, storytelling, and consumerism. The novel alternates between sections told from the points of view of a variety of characters in the J.Crew orbit,…
Micah Zevin on Brendan Lorber’s if this is paradise why are we still driving?

Can we ever escape the hidden meanings of existence, the state of saying or doing one thing and meaning another? What to make of the silences, the pauses, fissures, elisions, we find in conversation or on the page? What can be mined from what’s missing? How will the gaps or empty spaces be filled if…
“History Repeats and Stories Become Complete”: Fabulations, minimalist short stories by José de Piérola, reviewed by Mark Crimmins

José de Pierola’s Fabulations is an impressive and deeply stimulating collection, one that explores a diapason of forms and modes as it slyly reinterprets the implications of its title. Fabulism, late in the second decade of the twenty-first century, is one of the favored modes of a new generation of writers who have moved on…
Our Pool Party Bus Forever Days, short stories by David James Keaton, reviewed by Jason Teal

Never mind that his introduction of best car chase cinema (“Gasoline Dreams”) is worth the price of admission, David James Keaton is a bizarrely prolific writer who gets slept on beyond our genre congregation, and this is the world’s biggest shame. I’m here to expose the wrongdoings of we vapid readers, and to provide recognition…
Killing Poppy, a novel by William Perk, reviewed by Paul Dee Fecteau

When we tell stories about addiction, two well-worn narratives hold sway. In one, addicts personify failure, debasing themselves in the face of the glory of the American Dream. In the other, they embody nobility, struggling against a darkness not of their own making. In Killing Poppy, published in September by Apocalypse Party, William Perk savages…