Tag: Brett Beach
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Fiction: Brett Beach’s “Eastside”
Eastside The missing boy lived a block over, in the part of town where children often disappeared. This was in May, when you folded back your jeans to show me pink lace. Your skin was shadow beneath my fingers pressing toward warmth. Your mouth to mine, I joked that you were trying to steal my…
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DON’T ASK ME TO SPELL IT OUT, by Robert James Russell
L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do thing differently there.” A portion of the quote reappears as a title midway through Robert James Russell’s collection Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out—and aptly. The Michigan, Chicago, Ozarks and Ohio evoked in most of these stories, and the Midwestern narrators flung far afield…
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The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, by Okla Elliot and Raul Clement
A long novel is a different beast. In its pages, a whole world may be contained; characters arrive and depart, suggesting lives begun long before; a reader can spend days, even weeks, tracking the progress of a plot that winds and dips and twists, building inexorably toward an explosive finish. The first book of The…
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If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, by Ryan Werner
In Ryan Werner’s slim, beautiful collection, If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, twins vie for birthright order, a hollow-boned girl traces her ancestry back to birds, and at the end of the world, a man just wants to eat a caramel apple. These stories are brief but never elliptical; the past is ever…
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Motherfucking Sharks, a novel by Brian Allen Carr, reviewed by Brett Beach
A stranger comes to town. We know this story, don’t we? He warns of approaching danger, which the townspeople ignore. And because we are familiar with this story, we know the tale will not have a happy ending for most. The stranger—crazy or haunted, ill and raving—is right. Brian Allen Carr’s Motherfucking Sharks is a…
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The Old Priest, by Anthony Wallace
“The state of New Jersey seems to be not much more than a gigantic strip mall.” This reflection comes near the end of Anthony Wallace’s The Old Priest, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 2013. The collection’s final story turns a mythic eye to the recent past, when the state was a wild…
Heavy Feather Review 