Doing our best since 2009
1978 Ford Econoline “Cruising Van,” black with white and orange trim, and adhesive reflective-parallelogram letters spelling out PHILO CALLAHAN WILDLIFE CONTROL on each side; buried, along with the corpses of one adult male human and several animals, ten feet beneath the wild grasses, chicory, and phlox of a privately owned hillside overlooking Onteo Lake, in…
Sean Bernard’s Can Writing Be Taught & Other Novel Ideas (What Books Press, October 2026) is a metafictional reflection on reading, writing, loneliness, and the creation of meaning. It’s a strange ride through writing prompts that have words crossed out, summaries of other books, and an ever-shifting point-of-view. But despite the formal inventiveness, there’s a…
The stories in Tom Andes’s new collection are often about endings: endings of relationships, of lives, of dreams and delusions. While the stories offer humor in abundance, they unfold in an atmosphere of ominous inevitability. They also reflect a concern with American factionalism—generational, political, cultural, regional—and the misunderstandings it engenders. In “Nashville Radio,” the narrator,…
In the spring of 2023, I was working diligently through the second semester of my MFA. Every three weeks, I sent my advisor a new packet of work, containing a short story or two, a craft essay, and a letter.
I first met Bradley Sides at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was showcasing his short story collection Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood (Montag Press, 2024). We soon discovered our shared loves of magic in fiction and southern literature, and Bradley impressed me with his generous spirit. Those same themes–magic,…
I wanted to review Book of Hours by Ellen O’Connell Whittet not because I am a mother—I am not—but because I am a medievalist. I was curious to see how the author incorporated the lives of medieval female saints into a story of a modern woman. In this novel, Whittet weaves faith, medicine, feminism, and…
Our longtime fiction editor Lacey Dunham is stepping away from the role, and shares some reflections below. I can’t say enough about what a pleasure and privilege it has been to work closely together for nearly a decade (longer, in fact, if you count our first work together when she was a publicist representing my…
A fluctuating, unstable choral voice narrates Directory, an experimental, interlinked collection of flash fiction. The “we” governs the pages until the final story, whose revelation I won’t spoil.
The name Éric Rohmer conjures up, for fans of French New Wave cinema, images of lush lawns and beautiful young people, the sounds of their halfhearted flirtations and of waves crashing against sand. His legacy as a filmmaker is built on a sixty-year career that mixed these hallmark elements with a candid visual style and…