New Books: November 2019
The end is near! (The end of the year.) Here is our penultimate 2019 roundup of new fiction releases we can’t wait to read. They basically all come out on the 5th, so you have plenty of time to collect…
Blog
After Dinner / Girls in the Woods by Jacqueline Doyle
After Dinner A woman sits at a kitchen table, sipping chamomile tea and reading a book. The dishes have been rinsed, the counters and sink cleared, the dishwasher hums. Outside the window over the sink, the night is…
Suspense in Flannery O’Connor’s “The River”
By Alyson Mosquera Dutemple • Long before we discover that the main character, a little boy named Harry, will drown in the final moments of Flannery O’Connor’s “The River,” we are unsettled while reading the story. On the surface,…
Breathing for Two by Allison Light
I want to bring the rubber ducks. Patrick wants me to leave the rubber ducks behind. We bicker about it for days, before the move, and when our closets have been emptied and we’ve packed the essentials and there…
Hybrid Interview: Shane Jones
Essay by J.A. Tyler • There was something about Shane Jones’s new novel Vincent and Alice and Alice that held me at bay. I’m a huge fan of his work, loved his previous novels, have admired his style for years.…
Delaware by James Davidson
Amy had never noticed it before. It might have just appeared during the night, but it was so innocuous, it could have been waiting there, unobserved, for years. This childish symbol, something like a diamond with rays emanating from…
Withholding Information in Nathan Englander’s “Reunion”
By David Saltzman • As students of fiction, we’re often taught that in crafting a story, the writer should rigidly mete out information, ensuring that a reader is always, without exception, situated as to speaker, scene, and story. When…
How Loudly We Dead Howl by Sarah Arantza Amador
The approach is by boat—the passage is narrow. Our steamer slipped through the still, dark water. Us passengers, bewitched, red-eyed and scorch-lunged refugees from the burning south, reached out to touch the icy granite, scraped clean as a birth…
Self-Salvation, Structure, and Sex Part II: Intertextuality in Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch”
By Candace Walsh • In Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” the authors use intertextuality as a structural element: a rhythmic, outside-of-time interruption of the chronological main story. Simultaneously, each of the female narrators…
2019 Nominations
For the 2019 Best of the Net This anthology promotes the diverse and ever-growing collection of voices who are publishing their work online and serves to bring greater respect to an innovative and continually expanding medium. “Ricochet” by Paul…