Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America
Lorrie Moore is good at writing short stories. This surprises no one, I assume. I had read one or two of her stories in anthologies, but never took the time…
Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior
Mary Gaitskill’s debut story collection is definitely one of the best collections I’ve read this year. It’s a wide range of stories -male and female protagonists, 1st and 3rd person…
New Publication at BODY PARTS MAGAZINE: THE JOURNAL OF HORROR & EROTICA
Got another story published! Hop on over to the digital edition of Body Parts to read my story "Murder and Cruelty Free" and please don't assume anything negative about my…
NonBinary Review 8: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
All of the stories, poems and other literary works in Issue 8 of NonBinary Review are connected in some way to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The first section…
The Wisdom of Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton knows his way around the English language. He often makes it do silly things, purely for his own amusement. His Father Brown books, especially, have a sense of…
Gateway to Paradise Revisited, and Further Notes
I recently had a conversation with someone more familiar with this book than myself, and it brought up a few things that I didn’t really address -or that I addressed…
Matthew Vollmer’s Gateway to Paradise
This is the third book of Vollmer’s I’ve read, the most recent, and the one I’d be least likely to recommend. I loved “Inscriptions for Headstones” -it was a fantastically…
Matthew Vollmer’s “Future Missionaries of America”
Future Missionaries of America Matthew Vollmer This was my favorite short story collection of 2016 (of meaning “read during”). Vollmer’s book “Inscriptions for Headstones” was high on my list in…
The Short Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
http://assets.uvamagazine.org/images/uploads/2015/Spring_2015/BreecePancake.jpg Breece D’J Pancake killed himself at 27. Whenever someone who evidences some kind of brilliance kills themselves (or merely meets an untimely end,) it seems difficult to separate the…
The Tenth of December, the Limits of Irony (and the Best Kind of Irony)
image via Goodreads Saunders is very much a known entity, but that’s certainly no strike against the man. He’s got a style that (among many other things) seems to both…