Set between China and The US over a thirty-year period, My Old Faithful tells the story of one Chinese family and their growth over ten interconnected stories. Author Yang Huang’s debut novel, Living Treasures, told the story of two young lovers [...]
Set in 2021, The Wolves Within Our Walls is a realistic look at a future where the height of technology crumbles and those who survive the attack on the nation are left to wander and survive the best they can. It is a standard dystopian novel in [...]
To say that Weldon Kees is an obscure poet is an understatement – outside of the poetry world you won’t find anyone who’s heard of him, and even in poetry circles he is something of an obscurity. Yet he was a peer of Robert Lowell’s [...]
Set deep in the Midwest, This self-published title from PJ Colando is a strange mix of things. It has Americana in its pages about football games, farming, large gatherings, and church. Yet it pushes some strange boundary introducing themes of [...]
Paul Auster is a madman. His first novel in seven years, 4 3 2 1, is nearly 900 pages and is narratively a never-ending ocean of stories featuring dozens of characters. 4 3 2 1 gives us four simultaneous yet different narratives genetically [...]
Ann Grant’s The Theory of Sam is as short as novella’s come – in under 90 pages it can be read in roughly an hour. It is 10 short chapters from start to finish and spans just three days in the life of Sam Walker and his life as an English [...]
Mohammad Rabie’s Otared is a novel built on hardships and the detachment that it creates. It’s a look at poverty and struggle in Egypt in AD 2025 as citizens seek out existence in Cairo’s war-torn landscape. Otared’s matter of fact tone and [...]
What is it here I have done And am waiting for? For what it’s worth, love, A stone asks the same Question of the river Have I broken you yet? – Bone River (I.) This question arises at the end of the poem in John Sibley Williams’ [...]
In 1920, in the isolated Steens Mountain area of southeastern Oregon, a man named Ralph Grant buried his mother Martha K. L. Grant in the cold February ground. There were no funeral homes in the dense wilderness of the region during the time, [...]
The cyclone in Leesa Dean’s Waiting For The Cyclone is many things. It is a figurative disruption, chaos for its characters, yet it also a way of life. Her collection of thirteen stories picks up its characters on a whim and ends them in [...]
There is a scene that strikes me in Alice Rene’s The Other Side Of Him as being a larger representation of the novel itself. It starts when Tom and his sister Claire, both coming-of-age adults, return to visit their immigrant mother in San [...]
George RR Martin is at the height of fantasy authors. And perhaps of all authors in general. His work in progress, The Winds Of Winter, the seventh installment in his highly anticipated series will without question be a bestseller. In the [...]
“The Beatles became the Beatles only after they became the Beatles.” This is the infancy of a dream – the naive and innocent desire which many artists and musicians fostered before fame. Names change once a person hits it big. Cher can get [...]
“Did you hear the one about the woman whose illness made her confuse happiness and sadness?”- Pleasant, healthy-appearing adult white female in no acute distress The poet Anne Sexton once said, “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen [...]
“How about if I just start ? – ” So Joseph Somoza begins in the poem “Makeshift” – an outstanding opener that begins the first poem inside the three sections that make up his latest poetry collection As Far I Know. It’s far from a [...]
The best moments in Richard Platz’s Vanishing Point come when our characters are in their quiet moments. If there is a vanishing point for them – or end of the world – it comes through their isolation and moments of solitude that [...]
“Don’t try,” Charles Bukowski once said when asked about the creative process. Here he tells other writers if it doesn’t burst out of you, simply don’t do it. Don’t try. He went on to elaborate the phrase further to fellow writer John William [...]
Loss is a sacred thing. In The Loss of All Lost Things it is held in such regard that it becomes an isolating and painfully lonely reminder of things that were, and are, lost and never coming back. Many characters hold on to loss because it is [...]
“Your whiskers are grey, you must have stories” So “she” says in the title poem of The Underwater Typewriter. “She” mind you is never named. You will find that common in Marc Zegan’s collection. This is an emotional distance not too uncommon in [...]
David Armand’s The Gorge puts us deep in the Louisiana backcountry where 22-year-old Clyde Tuller is sitting in a small-town prison for the murder of his girlfriend, Amber Varnado. Her body is found deep in a rocky gorge, and Tuller is an easy [...]
