Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night by Tracy DeBrincat (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

What follows is the seventh in J. A. Tyler’s full-press of Subito Press, a series of reviews appearing at [PANK] over the course of 2012, covering every title available from Subito Press. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press reviews have covered every title from Calamari Press (at Big Other) and from Publishing Genius Press (at Mud Luscious Press).

In comparison to earlier winners in the fiction category of Subito’s annual competition, DeBrincat’s Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night is a much more exposition-based collection, leaning far more heavily on traditional beginning / middle / end structures for each of its stories. This, in and of itself, makes Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night a new sort of playing ground for Subito, and a place to pick up new readers who might otherwise be daunted by more aggressively unique voices like Adam Peterson’s My Untimely Death or Andrew Farkas’s Self-Titled Debut. However, this also means that because DeBrincat supports her stories by traditional constructions, her writing is a bit more prone to predictability. Continue reading

My Untimely Death by Adam Peterson (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

What follows is the second in J. A. Tyler’s full-press of Subito Press, a series of reviews appearing at [PANK] over the course of 2012, covering every title available from Subito Press. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press series have appeared at Big Other (a full-press of Calamari Press) and with Mud Luscious Press’s online quarterly (a full-press of Publishing Genius Press).

Adam Peterson’s My Untimely Death, the winner in fiction of Subito Press’s inaugural contest, is a bright and clever collection of flash vignettes intent on showing the absurdity of death, no matter where or how it is manifest, and no matter how much we are expecting, or, in the case of some of Peterson’s narrators, eagerly anticipating it.

Within the opening pieces, Peterson perfectly illustrates what we can expect from the structure of the book: a nameless narrator struck down or otherwise overcome by a death of various modes and methods, often predicted, and always poetically charged and under-written with a brutal touch of humor. Continue reading