Reviews

The Reviewed: My Only Wife by Jac Jemc The Reviewer: Joellyn Powers *** My hope is that people will find a page and read it. I hope they’ll fall in love with it and look for the book. If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be married to your best friend [...]

The Reviewed: If You Knew Suzy by Katherine Rosman The Reviewer: Judy Clement Wall *** At first I thought it was funny, and then completely appropriate, that the words I’d use to describe If You Knew Suzy don’t fit together nicely in a sentence. Words like unflinching, hilarious, detached, intimate, charming, heartbreaking. Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine [...]

The Reviewed: Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus by Deborah Jiang Stein The Reviewer: Judy Clement Wall *** A little over halfway through her memoir, EVEN TOUGH GIRLS WEAR TUTUS, Deborah Jiang Stein writes, “How is it really possible anyone is born in prison? I have never met anyone with a story like mine…” In the pages [...]

The Reviewed: Betty Superman by Tiff Holland The Reviewer: Chris Vola *** Some familial bonds can be impossible to sever, regardless of how inextricably fraught with the rust of pain and discontent the individual links may seem. The 10 connected stories in Tiff Holland’s Betty Superman painstakingly examine the tumultuous, occasionally hilarious and wrenchingly memorable [...]

The Reviewed: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black The Reviewer: Judy Clement Wall *** I read Robin Black’s short story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, in part, because it was recommended to me by someone who doesn’t like short stories. She says short stories tend to [...]

The Reviewed: Domestic Apparition The Reviewer: Len Kuntz *** A lot of story collections today are idols unto themselves — bland, trite writing that makes one wonder how the author cajoled a publisher into producing the manuscript. But then there are those others. The story collections that knot your stomach with barbwire, flicking out scenes that [...]

The Reviewed: Hot Teen Slut by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz The Reviewer: Chris Vola *** Originally published in 2001, and recently re-released by Write Bloody Publishing, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s second collection of poems, Hot Teen Slut, offers an honest and prescient glimpse of a side of the adult industry rarely seen or considered, the desk jobs [...]

The Reviewed: Ghostwritten by David Mitchell The Reviewer: Corey Eastwood  *** “London is a language. I guess all places are,” writes David Mitchell in his 1999 debut, Ghostwritten. By his own definition Mitchell attempts to speak nine languages throughout the course of this imaginative, wide-reaching book.  Called a “novel in nine parts,” Ghostwritten employs a [...]

The Reviewed: Other People We Married by Emma Straub The Reviewer: Judy Clement Wall *** Here’s what I love about Emma Straub’s collection of short stories, Other People We Married. All the stories are about me. Even the ones that can’t be about me, because I’ve never been to Italy, or been a gay man, [...]

The Reviewed: Tenderoni (forthcoming), a collection of flash fiction by Kathy Fish The Reviewer: Sam Rasnake *** One of the gifts of narrative is in creating worlds for readers to enter and spend time in. Good books of short fiction and flash offer readers many points of discovery and connection. Kathy Fish, a writer whose [...]