Neither Here Nor There
A book as beautiful and infused with longing as the landscape it depicts. Marcel Jolley is a master of desire, and his protagonists, caught between lives they can hardly tolerate and futures they can...
View ArticleDutch Treatment
This collection of three short stories, winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, is about humans trying to understand themselves and each other, specifically across cultural borders, against the...
View ArticleThe Last Game We Played
These stories express situations by taking stock of history. This is especially true for the stories that are set in the Middle East, where Jo Neace Krause looks at the maddening violence that has...
View ArticleSigns of Life
In Signs of Life, Norman Waksler deftly weaves stories of change both brutal and subtle, encounters both urban and urbane. Covering life from the first childhood pangsof love to the moral conundrums of...
View ArticleUnending Rooms
The winner of the Hudson Prize, this collection of stories, mainly set in the Southwest, digs deep into the lives of its characters. Daniel Chacon’s writing is very lucid and dips into Carveresque...
View ArticleThe Butterfly Collector
The Butterfly Collector is full of people you know: a beautician, a lawyer, a man with Alzheimer’s who takes his first nightcap at three in the afternoon. But each of these thoroughly knowable...
View ArticleSaid and Done
A father dealing equivocally with his son’s ambiguous sexuality conducts a drunken tour of a famous artist’s birthplace. Two lonely women turn the tables on an antic stalker. A shy college kid comes...
View ArticleAnatolia and Other Stories
In these eleven stories of novelistic breadth and ambition, global tensions and harmonies come alive as rarely seen in contemporary fiction. Shivani takes the measure of the fallout from globalization...
View ArticleLosing Camille
Losing Camille is grounded in the American Midwest, but the characters who inhabit its ten stories are on the move—from youth to independence, safety to adventure, familiar reassurance to dangerous...
View ArticlePictures of Houses with Water Damage
Pictures of Houses with Water Damage is a collection of stories about disillusioned people making sense of their lives: when patriotism to fight in Iraq turns to the betrayal of love; when a desert...
View ArticleA Catalogue of Everything in the World
A Catalogue of Everything in the World, winner of the 2008 St. Lawrence Book Award, is an allegory of identity: characters’ entwined experiences share an undercurrent of uncertainty, of...
View ArticleFrom the Darkness Right Under Our Feet
Brutality, defeat, loneliness, and mournful longing haunt and ignite Finn’s collection with an assembly of unforgettable characters confronted by life-changing crises that force them to make impossible...
View ArticlePeople Are Strange
Misfits and outcasts populate People Are Strange, a collection of stories by one of the Philippines’ most enigmatic writers and winner of the Philippine Centennial Prize, the highest award ever given...
View ArticleThe Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men
Adam Prince’s highly anticipated debut, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, is a seduction in its own right, a striptease that peals all the way down to the soul. Men attempt to negotiate between their...
View ArticleLoving You the Way I Do
Stories. A young man believes his new Saudi bride is a suicide bomber. Stories. A woman hears something crying outside her bedroom window. Is the baby alone in the desert? Is it sick? Is it hurt?...
View ArticleThe Aversive Clause
The Aversive Clause is rough. The characters are grasping, helpless; all their romances are doomed and their worlds inevitably will come crashing to an end. The stories are not gentle or sweet, but...
View ArticlePriors
Priors is a collection of four stories and one novella, all of which explore the tension between the lives that we want for ourselves and the lives we are living. Set in the northwest, Marcel Jolley’s...
View ArticleThe Man Who Noticed Everything
Dark, cerebral stories of the American grotesque that light up hidden corners of the individual and national consciousness.
View ArticleScouting for the Reaper
Each of the characters in Scouting for the Reaper faces an unanticipated challenge: transporting a truck load of penguins across the country, arranging a proper Jewish burial for the remains of...
View ArticleYour Life Idyllic
The characters in these stories think too much. It’s why they suffer. Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” is a curse here, as the mostly blue collar Detroiters in these stories wrestle with the rich,...
View ArticleMiracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets
Excerpt From the Title Story Zigfrīds Imants Lenc did not have a name on his home planet, because names were superfluous, but in Lummings, Alabama, where he operated the Latvian restaurant opposite the...
View ArticleThe Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers
There are women writing short stories today that take chances, risks—you might even call their work provocative. The Lineup is a collection of twenty of the most compelling, powerful, and honest...
View ArticleBlood: Stories
Sharply strange and eerily familiar. Absurdly funny and terrifyingly serious. Surreal, fantastic, gritty, real. The stories in Matthew Cheney’s Hudson Prize-winning debut collection range across...
View ArticleWhere We Go When All We Were Is Gone
“You should be here; he’s simply magnificent.” These are the final words a biologist hears before his Margaret Mead-like wife dies at the hands of Godzilla. The words haunt him as he studies the Kaiju...
View ArticleThe Big Book of Sounds and Other Stories
Excerpt from “I Want This Always” # 41 – A gentle late spring wafting with overtones of 2 AM on the stretch of grass adjacent to the University library one block from your dormitory, coupled with a...
View ArticleTrue Ash
Microchips that don’t know when to stop, pop culture clones poised to take over the planet, a mysterious burial in a popular park, candy cigarettes wreathed in sugary ash. In these interlocked short...
View ArticlePrimitivity
Excerpt from “Spirit Transcript #41: Liberty Briscoe, retired madam, death 1882” Working girls never shed a man’s skin. You can wash his scent from your sheets. Wash inside and out, but the next thing...
View ArticleSomething Like the End
Winner of the Fall 2017 Black River Chapbook Competition Laced with foreboding and propulsive menace, Ashley Morrow Hermsmeier’s new collection of short fiction reverberates with the clang of alarm...
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