Category: Reviews

Reviewed by Michelle Newby                       Spheres of Disturbance, Amy Schutzer

“The babysitter has stolen the Xanax,” begins “Queen of Hearts,” one of the short stories in Sara Lippmann’s debut collection, Doll Palace. The Xanax in question belongs to the narrator, a father who is faced with resolving the predicament at hand.

Atticus Books has politely and perhaps reasonably requested that all reviews of The Shimmering Go-Between avoid spoilers. The trouble with this request is that the content of Lee Klein’s debut novel is so bizarre

Reviewed by Michelle Newby                       Backswing, Aaron Burch Queen’s Ferry

Echo Lake, the new novel by Letitia Trent, concerns the time spent by a mother and daughter in the community of Heartshorne, Oklahoma. The mother, Connie, fled the town as a teenager for initially undisclosed reasons.

Douglas Kearney’s Patter is a book of various and inventive forms, the title of which plays on the Latin for father and on the sound of little feet, suggesting, too, a verbal ease that seems deliberately at odds with the book’s difficult subject matter.

When we hear the term unaccompanied minors, we imagine young travelers ushered on and off airplanes by nurturing flight attendants, wearing wing pins and given extra snacks during flights so they know they are cared for.

Not For Nothing by Stephen Graham Jones is a new hardboiled detective novel written in second person. Many know the second person format from those appliance manuals none of us ever read, but my introduction to the second person narrative came from Stephen King’s classic post-apoplectic thriller, The Stand.

In an interview, George Singleton once had the following to say: “Unfortunately, I am my main characters, for better or worse.” Now, in his sixth collection of short stories, Between Wrecks, he leaves us with a cast of tough and tender characters, characters who quite often cope with their lives through drinking, smoking, and even more importantly, humor. With each story, I found myself not only admiring Singleton’s abilities as a writer, but wondering where or how I might meet such a figure, or given his statement, figures.