Doing our best since 2009
In a remote Australian mountain forest there is a black orchid. It is the last of its species: an endling. As Keely Jobe’s debut novel The Endling begins, the orchid decides that “for the sake of its kind, it will hold on a little longer. It won’t flounder. It will remember the way the orchids…
An Essay wherein an Author of a Chapbook of Very Smol Stories muses on the 12 micros and flash fictions in the Collection to see if any “Research” took place.
At the start of Nice Places, Vincent Chu’s debut novel, twenty-something Georgie loses his job at a soulless corporation. Instead of coming clean about his lack of future plans, and despite having never gone anywhere on his own, Georgie tells his colleagues he is quitting to travel the world—and promptly starts an Instagram account to…
Danilo John Thomas’s story collection, Ore Vein, (Veliz Press) reminds me of a lenticular—one of those weird grooved pictures that shifts images—and I’m a kid jumping from one side of the room to another, watching the flowers bloom then wilt, or the skeleton grow flesh.
Winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize, Halldór Laxness wrote novels, essays, plays, and translations, and was a champion of Iceland, its history, and its people. In this novel, published in Icelandic in 1970, Laxness takes readers on a stroll through Icelandic history, a history with few documents and populated by invisible men and women.
The shared terrain, in place and theme, gave Toor and I a lot to talk about in a recent conversation that took place online, including the idea of representation in fiction, coming-of-age narratives, and more.
Susanna Crossman’s novel, The Orange Notebooks, is a compelling study of grief’s many colors.