Tag: Outpost19
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Paul Dee Fecteau Reviews THE FAMILY DOLLS: A MANSON PAPER + PLAY BOOK! by John Reed
I did not try to cut out the artwork in John Reed’s The Family Dolls, released in book form in July by Outpost19. I am not saying it can’t be done, for I admit to being reticent with scissors due to a lack of dexterity which, among other things, makes it impossible for me to…
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“Notes on Ann Lewinson’s Still Life with Meredith,” a book review by Peter Valente
Ann Lewinson’s novella Still Life with Meredith is fantastically perverse, erudite, essayistic, and precise as a laser as it navigates high and low cultures and literatures. With the passionate eye of a critic, the narrator flirts with Lacan and Derrida and with raw sexual language. The result is a novella that is funny, bizarre, unhinged,…
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NOTHING SHORT OF: SELECTED TALES FROM 100 WORD STORY, an anthology of mirco fiction, reviewed by Amity Hoffman
A crossdressing meth-addicted Pee-wee Herman impersonator, a mail-order minister, religious bees, an inflatable girlfriend, missed connections in Antarctica, and the first children in space all have one thing in common: they only need one hundred words to tell their story. Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story is an anthology of the best…
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ROOTED, the best new arboreal nonfiction edited by Josh MacIvor-Andersen, reviewed by Miranda Schmidt
Recently, Portland, my home, was covered in a layer of ash and smoke from nearby wildfires in the forested Columbia Gorge. Wildfires are common in the west but this year’s intensely hot and dry summer has created conditions that mean, as we inched towards fall, it felt as if the whole of the west coast…
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Gisele Firmino’s THE MARBLE ARMY
Brazil and America might appear to have many differences—language, development, and location. However, at one time, America and Brazil were both colonies fighting off the suppressor to gain freedom of speech and assembly. The Marble Army by Gisele Firmino eliminates all predisposed differences, so the reader can relate to these characters from across the globe…
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Book Review: Vivian Wagner on Like a Song, an essay collection by Michelle Herman
Reading Michelle Herman’s essays is like sitting down with a friend over coffee and discussing life, love, TV, and parenting. She’s conversational and intimate, and she makes this kind of writing look easy. Don’t let that fool you, though: her work is carefully and beautifully crafted, and her recent collection, Like a Song, is no…
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Understudies, by Ravi Mangla
In Ravi Mangla’s Understudies the unnamed, first-person narrator, a high school teacher, helps his mother overcome her fear of flying, chills with a neighbor obsessed with a female movie star who’s moved into the neighborhood, and learns he’s about to be a father. He speaks in episodic vignettes about his job, his friends, his live-in…
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Because Every Day Brings a New Jumble of Knives: An Interview with Douglas Watson
When I read Douglas Watson’s debut story collection, The Era of Not Quite, I was awash with a rare and nourishing feeling: that what I was reading was exactly what I needed to be reading at that time exactly. Each of his stories deals a dark and witty blow. The collection is alive with a…
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Commercial Fiction, stories by Dave Housley, reviewed by Nicholas Grider
Dave Housley’s Commercial Fiction is exactly what the title suggests, in two senses of the term. First, it’s literally short fiction that curls itself around standard network TV commercials, with anything from Taco Bell to Cialis given the brief 3D space of psychologically complex characters, many of whom, beneath the plywood façade of the commercial,…
Heavy Feather Review 