Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail – Kelly Luce
I would happily suggest that Luce contributes as much to the contemporary renaissance of the short story in her first work as Russell, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders have with their recent masterpieces.
Hawthorn and Child – Keith Ridgway
Hawthorn and Child is a fundamentally conventional work of fiction, with arguably the imposed tension between reading it as a novel and reading it a series of short stories the sole adventurous feature.
Imagine the George Saunders’ Band covering a song by the Thomas Pynchon Orchestra and you have a pretty good idea of what sort of book The Facades is.
One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses – Lucy Corin
What does the apocalypse mean for narrative?
Hill WIlliam – Scott McClanahan
An attempt to physically break the memories out from the lockbox in his head, pain be damned.
The poorest, youngest, least-defended bodies are handed around, back and forth.
They Dragged Them Through the Streets – Hilary Plum
The message these mourners and friends struggled so desperately to express echoes emptily. It’s almost as if their pain had never been.
The Revolution of Every Day – Cari Luna
The knives aren’t what they used to be.
Very Recent History – Choire Sicha
Sicha makes us remember those intense moments and the tangles of our lives, both emotional and financial, which is how Very Recent History gets under our skins.
It is as if the atomistic building-blocks of his sentence-based universe had melted and run into one another.