by Stephen Febick | Apr 12, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Science Fiction, Sponsored
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 teacher in San...
by Stephen Febick | Apr 10, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Horror, Mystery, Crime & Thriller
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 simply put depictions of...
by Stephen Febick | Mar 24, 2017 | Uncategorized
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’ Disinheritance. It’s a retort...
by Stephen Febick | Feb 16, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Biographies & Memoirs, History, Portland Publishers, Sponsored
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, and that was “even if one...
by Stephen Febick | Dec 9, 2016 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), General Fiction, Short Stories
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 places further away, and...