There’s a moment near the beginning of “Ten Thousand Years,” the sixth story in Greg Schutz’s debut short story collection, Joyriders, where the sober protagonist Carter drinks cream soda on his back stoop as he watches “combines drag the fields, corn crackling in their combs.” The fields will return in a horrific moment at the …
There is a moment early in Are You Happy?, the title story from Lori Ostlund’s new collection, where Phil, the story’s protagonist, reflects on his decision not to bring his partner, Kelvin, with him to visit his dying mother. Because he has not explicitly told his family about Kelvin’s existence and not talked to them about …
In his debut short story collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody, Jared Lemus assembles dynamic slice-of-life stories about men and boys living in Guatemala and its diaspora, a perspective that enriches the growing canon of Latinx lit. With eight stories set in Guatemala and four in the United States, readers accompany unassuming characters as they scrape by in their …
Henry David Thoreau once said, “Not until we’re lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” This same sentiment speaks to the heart of Allegra Hyde’s short story collection, The Last Catastrophe, an assemblage of fifteen speculative stories that creatively consider the consequences of a not-too-distant future that at times feels so resonant and eerily familiar one …
Everyone cares about something. Some people care for human life—children, parents, lovers. Some are also very passionate about inanimate objects—cell phones, computers, make up. Above all else, there is always one thing that we care about, one thing that we would push ourselves to the most challenging limits for, would defy all odds, something that …
Artist Paul Klee said, “The father of the arrow is the thought: How do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain?” Let’s analyze that, the metaphor, the metatheory, the meta—or, let’s not. Instead, let’s look at the work of Christopher DeWeese, a poet from Ohio whose recent collection reflects the same theories that …
I. Many movies today still do not pass the Bechdel Test, which asks that two, named female characters speak to each other during a film about something other than a man. Created by American cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, the initial idea for the test came from her 1985 cartoon strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. Because …