Tag: Erin Flanagan
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Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polek, a very real story collection from Soft Skull Press, reviewed by Erin Flanagan
This slim collection of compact stories left me dumbfounded that we’re given the agency to run our own lives when it’s clear there are myriad ways we’re screwing them up. Disconnection, isolation, distraction, and desire are just a few of the ploys we dumb humans engage to safeguard against making connections that are too true,…
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Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar, a debut novel by Ron A. Austin, reviewed by Erin Flanagan
Avery Colt is a kid who could use a break. In addition to the everyday struggles of adolescence, he’s caught in the webs of poverty, masculine expectation, and systemic racism that are keeping him, his family, and his community down. Set in North St. Louis, Ron A. Austin’s debut novel (winner of the Nilsen Prize)…
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Erin Flanagan Reviews Jamel Brinkley’s Debut Story Collection, A Lucky Man
Absent fathers abound in this debut collection of stories, leaving behind their complicated legacies of race and love. As Eric says in “Everything the Mouth Eats,” “Isn’t it family that, in so many ways, determines our approach to life’s deceptions?” One feels the holes left by these absent fathers on every page, as the characters…
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“Momentum of Connections”: Erin Flanagan Interviews Augustus Rose
Augustus Rose’s first novel, The Readymade Thief, is a fervent mix of art, deceit, puzzles, subterfuge, coincidence, and meaning, all hung on the fast-paced structure of a thriller. Set in an underground world of deserted aquariums, abandoned buildings, and vacant homes, Lee must decode literal and figurative maps to stay one step ahead of a…
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“Genuine and True”: An Interview with Melissa Fraterrigo by Erin Flanagan
Melissa Fraterrigo’s first novel in stories, Glory Days, captures the desperation and beauty of living in the hardscrabble Midwest. Populated by fathers and daughters, lovers and enemies, the living and the dead, these characters struggle to figure out what they want and how to get it, along with the complicated order of what they need…
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Review: Erin Flanagan on Sara Majka’s Story Collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In
From the very start of Cities I’ve Never Lived In, Majka plunks the reader into a world where opposites coexist: coming and going, marriage and divorce, the past and the present. She prepares us to have our expectations upset, to see the contradictions our lives bear and how our worlds can hold disparate concepts—love and…
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Review: Erin Flanagan on Amy Gustine’s Story Collection You Should Pity Us Instead
Amy Gustine’s first collection of stories demonstrates a remarkable range, not only in situation and character, but also in the vast landscapes of human emotion and reaction. The characters surprise the reader with what they’re willing to do, but they also surprise themselves. In the opening story “All the Sons of Cain,” a mother goes…
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The Loss of All Lost Things, short stories by Amina Gautier, reviewed by Erin Flanagan
Winner of the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award, Gautier’s collection The Loss of all Lost Things centers, not surprisingly, around loss. These stories are populated with characters navigating the losses accrued in their pasts and dealing with their echoing effects in the present. Gautier doesn’t waste her time on the small losses—keys, pocketbooks—but goes for…
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“Stealing Breath”: An Interview with Bryn Chancellor by Erin Flanagan
Bryn Chancellor’s collection When Are You Coming Home? won the 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. She has received the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in fiction, literary fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Arizona Commission…
Heavy Feather Review 