Tag: Passenger Side Books

Zachary Kocanda on Ryan Werner’s Brainwashing Miss Teen Nosebleed USA, a book of one sentence album reviews

I was introduced to Ryan Werner’s work when I read and reviewed his novella Soft (Passenger Side Books, 2015) a few years ago. The novella is composed of two hundred fifty-eight micro-chapters, some as short as one sentence, so it made sense that for his new book, Brainwashing Miss Teen Nosebleed USA, Werner decided to…
I, Too, Am Ruining My Own Life: Gwen Werner’s I’M RUINING MY OWN LIFE

Gwen Werner gets me: anxieties about gender, sexuality; being a total nihilist but loving my nest anyway; trying to not be an awful straight-passing feminist; surviving, but barely. Werner stumbles through life, but her voice is unwavering: she might hate herself, but she knows how to shape a story, and, maybe most importantly in short-form…
Gwen Beatty’s KILL US ON THE WAY HOME

We read fiction to be who we’re not, if only for a few pages. And we don’t only do this when we read fiction. We do this, for example, when we pretend to be pregnant to befriend our Mormon ex-boyfriend’s wife. Or this is what one character does in “The Most Important Part of Being…
SOFT, by Ryan Werner

There’s not much to writing rock and roll music. A popular quote says all you need is three chords and the truth. Researching this quote, I learned that it was about country music (from Harlan Howard), but it applies to rock and roll, too. In fact, Lou Reed said one chord was fine, and two…
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…
Infinity’s Jukebox, by Matthew Burnside

In an early lecture James Joyce said the “human mind, as it looks forward and backward, attains an eternal state … taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.” I don’t know if Matthew Burnside was thinking of Joyce when he titled his chapbook, but Infinity’s…
Murmuration, by Ryan Werner

Ryan Werner’s Murmuration sort of creeps out from the distance like the starlings in the title story—you’ll see. These five stories are sneaky glimpses into what folks call “teenage angst” (but what actually overlaps into your twenties, sticks around for thirty, et cetera). He writes youth in a real way—in a backpack of your dad’s…
Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise, by Justin Lawrence Daugherty

“Why are we training Cerb to fight?” “Because he needs to rediscover his nature.” “What’s his nature?” Cerb ripped open the dummy’s head. “This,” dad said, pointing. I didn’t get it. I’d seen Cerb eat his own shit once. “Like the wolf. Or, like, whatever came before the wolf even.” Thus begins the strange world…