Fire / The Haunting / My Debt Collector by Brenda Peynado
Fire When I was eight years old, I watched a fire leap over the forest in glowing arcs and the men in my family battle it away. The fire had taken out farms on the panhandle for a…
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The Art of Time in David Gates’s “Banishment”
By Amber Wheeler Bacon • David Gates doesn’t recommend flashbacks to new writers when he’s teaching fiction. When line editing a student’s piece, he cuts pretty much every flashback he sees. I know because he cut plenty of mine when…
Daisy Johnson’s Cauldron: Realism & Fairy Tale Logic in “Albatross”
By Amelia Brown • Daisy Johnson is quite obviously inspired by folklore in her debut collection of stories, Fen—her pages are home to sentient objects, immortal monsters, and animal transformations galore. In fact, Johnson’s stories pledge their allegiance to two narrative…
New Books: October 23 Week
Here’s a quick look at some of the great fiction out this week. Happy pub day to all! Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black “This book is dark and captivating and essential. This book is a call to arms and…
A Little Like Hope by Jason Jackson
O was twenty-nine when he died, and now he lives in my head. He says it’s like swimming. He can’t breathe. “You don’t have to,” I say. “You’re dead.” But he just sighs. At first, there was a lot of…
Reaching Out: Endings of Joy Williams
By Elizabeth Mayer • Death and loss and decay pervade the stories of Joy Williams’s collection Escapes. If a character is not facing the immediacy of their own death, often they are mourning the loss of someone close to them. Yet…
The Art of Description in A.S. Byatt’s “The Chinese Lobster”
By Chaya Bhuvaneswar • The display is brightly lit, and arranged on a carpet of that fierce emerald-green artificial grass used by greengrocers and undertakers. Round the edges on open shells, is a border of raw scallops, the pearly flesh dulling,…
New Books: October 8 Week
Here’s a quick look at some of the great fiction out this week. Happy pub day to all! Camille Acker, Training School for Negro Girls “The lives of the girls and women featured in these stories are rendered with…
Kuchizi by Lucas Schaefer
Carlos Ortega roaming Africa was a ridiculous proposition, which was why everyone who heard the idea savored its deliciousness. For all his thirty-nine years, Carlos had prowled the same few blocks east of the interstate, and to conceive of him…
“Kuchizi,” by Lucas Schaefer, Part IV
This was how it came to pass that on a windy Friday evening in Malindi, Kenya, fighting out of the red corner, at 143 pounds, all the way from Austin, Texas, USA, came Carlos Ortega, in shackles and a loin…