Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors shed light on their recently released books by comparing them to weird things. This week Brett Petersen writes about The Parasite from Proto Space, his story collection published by Clash Books. If The Parasite From Proto Space & Other Stories were…
Samuel J. Adams The most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen go down was at an elementary school talent show in 1985. This new kid had moved to Ohio from Vermont or somewhere, some lakefront town where people wore turtleneck sweaters all year and nobody watched TV. He was eleven, young…
Matt Tompkins By the time my aunt arrived at the hospital, my uncle was dead. They’d rushed him from his office where he’d been working late. They said it was a massive heart attack, which you couldn’t say was totally unexpected: He smoked box upon box of a particular brand…
A debut collection that lingers in the curves of your eyes and during the double-blink gazes of late night shadows, Helen McClory has wound tight, unexpected stories in On the Edges of Vision.
The prose in Cyn Vargas’s debut collection, On the Way, has a casual, unforced power. Whether suffering through a parent’s disappearance in Guatemala or a vicious haircut on Division Avenue, her characters speak to the reader with an appealing frankness, confessing the most difficult aspects of their histories with a welcome, ironic sense of humor. “The kids were used to me not having any new clothes, or new Trapper Keepers, or those fancy juice boxes that weren’t really boxes at all,” explains the narrator of “Then It’s Over.” “They almost expected me to get a bad haircut, too.”
One successful author once called Master of Fine Arts programs silly things, adding that finding one’s voice was a simple as looking inside one’s throat. This author had not pursued an MFA, possibly due to his preexisting knowledge of the human anatomy.
In 2011 the world of historical maritime research was thrown into turmoil when a diary, purportedly written by a passenger of the Mary Celeste, was found on the island of Papatoa.
For surreal fiction to work, the writer must have confidence. No matter how fantastic the images and situations, it always comes back to confidence. The reader should not sense the author’s doubt in either prose or content. The best works of magical realism flood forward on the page like an endless ribbon being pulled, and this is so apparent in Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse’s newest short story collection, Snow and Shadow.
The short stories collected in Megan Martin’s Nevers do not seem to want to be short stories. They are probably best called something else; fittingly, the cover announces them as “Fictions,” of which there are
