Interview with Ron MacLean, author of Headlong
Ron MacLean’s Headlong, published earlier this month by Last Light Studio, did for me what the best novels do: It pulled me wholly into its world while I was reading it and burned like a steady flame...
View ArticleThe Fiery Alphabet
“When I think of all I tried to create in this world, your mind is the one unqualified success.” For Daniela Messo, math prodigy and heroine of The Fiery Alphabet, Diane Lefer’s sweeping and...
View ArticleAmerican 419 and Other Stories
In American 419 and Other Stories, journalist and novelist Adetokunbo Abiola takes us on an honest, unsanitized tour of modern Nigeria, one that is by turns tragic and darkly comic and in every sense...
View ArticleThe Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories
The complications of romantic partnerships are often explored in fiction, but rarely with the depth and insight that Wendy J. Fox brings to her début story collection, The Seven Stages of Anger, winner...
View ArticleHow I Kiss Her Turning Head
The stories in Jennifer Woodworth’s strangely beautiful How I Kiss Her Turning Head examine the most primal aspects of mother-child bonds, bonds that can surpass love and approach obsession, yet,...
View ArticleGifted and Talented
Who among you remembers those golden days when a middling high school student—a kid with respectable grades but with ACT scores in the toilet, with daydreaming making up a solid sixty percent of her...
View ArticleGhost Horse
One of my reviewing regrets of late is my delay in highly recommending Thomas H. McNeely’s powerful and moving coming-of-age novel Ghost Horse (winner of the Gival Press Novel Award). The setting is...
View ArticleSwarm to Glory
Last fall, after posting “Women: please send me your fiction,” I received a number of excellent books by women authors and their publishers. A dear friend and fellow writer who’d seen the post handed...
View ArticleMayumi and the Sea of Happiness
It’s rare for my attention to linger on the cover of a book I’m about to read, but it certainly did when I picked up Jennifer Tseng’s poetic, richly imagined début novel Mayumi and the Sea of...
View ArticleHawaiian Tales
Too often, recreational travel, even to the most interesting and exotic places, has the feeling of skimming across surfaces. As we move from notable site to notable site, we are sometimes dazzled. More...
View ArticleThe Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women
As a supporter of any initiative that aims to get more works by women writers published and reviewed, I was delighted when Shade Mountain Press came onto the literary scene in 2014. To quote from its...
View ArticleDeath Comes for the Deconstructionist
Daniel Taylor’s début novel, Death Comes for the Deconstructionist, is an engrossing and satisfying whodunit. But the central character and sleuth, Jon Mote, finds himself uncovering and confronting...
View ArticleThe Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories
The complications of romantic partnerships are often explored in fiction, but rarely with the depth and insight that Wendy J. Fox brings to her début story collection, The Seven Stages of Anger, winner...
View ArticleHow I Kiss Her Turning Head
The stories in Jennifer Woodworth’s strangely beautiful How I Kiss Her Turning Head examine the most primal aspects of mother-child bonds, bonds that can surpass love and approach obsession, yet,...
View ArticleGifted and Talented
Who among you remembers those golden days when a middling high school student—a kid with respectable grades but with ACT scores in the toilet, with daydreaming making up a solid sixty percent of her...
View ArticleGhost Horse
One of my reviewing regrets of late is my delay in highly recommending Thomas H. McNeely’s powerful and moving coming-of-age novel Ghost Horse (winner of the Gival Press Novel Award). The setting is...
View ArticleSwarm to Glory
Last fall, after posting “Women: please send me your fiction,” I received a number of excellent books by women authors and their publishers. A dear friend and fellow writer who’d seen the post handed...
View ArticleThe Mesmerist’s Daughter
The Mesmerist’s Daughter, a dark, poetic novella by Heidi James, was my perfect companion one recent gloomy afternoon, transfixing me from its first lines: My mother was a wolf. That was the first...
View ArticleNot a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu
Motherly praise and motherly criticism. For many women, these can be among the most gratifying and most wounding things in the world, and they have the power to shape the recipients’ lives—for good or...
View ArticlePeople Like You
If you’ve read more than a few of my postings on Small Press Picks, you might have noticed that I’m a big fan of the short story, and I’m always eager to check out new collections from small/indie...
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