Tag: Fiction
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“Emotional Resonances”: Jesi Buell Chats with Tariq Shah about His Debut Novel Whiteout Conditions (Two Dollar Radio)
Tariq Shah’s Whiteout Conditions is a slim book that, by centering on death, allows its protagonist to explore life. Ant, the main character, is back in town for a funeral in the middle of winter. As he wanders through his hometown and its memories, Shah leads us through a taut exploration of grief, masculinity, and revenge…
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“Accidental and Inevitable”: Marcus Pactor Talks to Christian TeBordo about His Short Story Collection Ghost Engine
Christian TeBordo’s Ghost Engine has everything I always want from a short story collection. These pieces are darkly humorous, formally inventive, oddly angled, and full of hard, electric prose. It deservedly won the inaugural Bridge Eight Press Prize, and it probably deserved to win a few other prizes too. It is one of the best…
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Haunted Passages: “Maxwell House’s Demon,” a short story by J. Thomas Murphy
She woke up to the rain and a vague sense of unease. The unease she attributed to the melancholy weather. The rain was nothing new. She started as usual: eating quickly, dressing slowly, letting the morning contain its own patterns and rhythms that she knew the rest of the day could not conform to. On…
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Haunted Passages: “Derek, Ricky, Umar, Gael,” a short story by Jackie Sizemore
The first ghost law was supposed to get everybody on better terms with their resident ghosts, but whoever wrote that didn’t know my newest roommate, Amber. Amber is a four-and-a-half foot tall teenage ghost that blew into my apartment two months ago. The whole apocalypse thing was a while back, but everybody knows there are…
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“When the Chicken Slowly Cooks You Back,” a short story for Flavor Town USA by Harrison Cook
When my grandpa was on the farm, she snapped around one thousand chicken necks and in one day killed, boiled, and dressed over one hundred chickens by herself. Word travels fast in small town Iowa; hops county to county and before long my grandma, or more so the image of the frenzied farm wife snapping…
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Short Story: “Bombing from Above” by Alex Kudera
In Xi’an, China, I had the runs. It had gone on for two days, and I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t stop going. In the middle of the night, I’d dash to our apartment’s American-style toilet bowl where it would pour out like a Biblical flood. On a stifling bus—one sardine among many—the urge would…
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“Last Call,” a Haunted Passages short story by Cassandra Clarke
“The Restaurant of Obscure Sorrows isn’t the best place to work,” I told Alice, “but at least there’s no surprise disappointments … except, when it’s the special.” “Surprise disappointment,” Alice said, one finger raised in the air like she was a game-show contestant, “is sprinkled with sage, the sweat of the hopeful, and sauteed in…
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Louis Zieja: Three Ekphrastic Monster Movie Noises for Haunted Passages
Them Ants (’54)“The sounds the giant ants emit in the film were the calls of bird-voiced tree frogs mixed in with the calls of a wood thrush, hooded warbler, and red-bellied woodpecker.” —Them! (1954 Film) Wikipedia It’s a sound reminiscent of rot, of decay, of hunger,the realization that we are just caloriesfor an unknowable colony.…
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Three Poems: Lee Hodge for Haunted Passages
HostageAfter Katie Peterson On the night I ended it the police had cordoned off every street surrounding the block to investigate a threat that had been called in on the house across the street from yours. Can’t turn down that road the neighbors had told me before I turned down the road. They pointed at…
Heavy Feather Review 