short story collection

[REVIEW] The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, by Matt Runkle

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animals

Brooklyn Arts Press

158 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Anna Mebel

 

Matt Runkle is both a writer and a visual artist currently studying at University of Iowa’s Center for the Book. He writes short stories and prose poems, makes collages, comics, and art books. Though The Story of How All Animals Are Different & Other Tales is his first book of short stories, Matt Runkle has also published a zine called RUNX TALES. As an artist, he is interested in assemblages, juxtapositions, things that most people would discard. These artistic practices filter into his writing. In The Story of How All Animals Are Different & Other Tales, Runkle mixes fairy tales, love stories, satire, dystopia, prose poems, and careful observations of the ordinary.

The stories are often very short but always efficient, showing us flashes of worlds similar to our own, yet slightly off—an apocalyptic scenario in which people live out of their cars, a supermarket located on the border between two countries, a town in which the punishment is election to public office. He finds “places where comings and goings occur from every side,” where borders dissolve and relationships become unstable, letting worrisome aspects of human nature emerge. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Scouting for the Reaper by Jacob M. Appel

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reaper

Black Lawrence Press

194 pages, $15.15
Review by Max Vande Vaarst

 

 

Jacob M. Appel’s Scouting for the Reaper is a masterpiece of human hysterics. In nearly each of these eight collected stories, which shift in perspective across age and gender lines, yet hold firm throughout to their essential self-seriousness, the Dundee-winning biochemist polymath Appel makes a habit of substituting obsession for conflict and the paranoiac for the poignant.

Our first encounter with Reaper’s “Dear Diary” brand of melodrama comes in equal doses through the three adolescent-narrated openers, “Choose Your Own Genetics,” “Creve Coeur” and the title story “Scouting for the Reaper.” The love interests here manifest themselves early, entering their respective scenes accompanied by hammy giveaway lines such as “He was a broad-shouldered, square-jawed teenage dreamboat…his cheeks blossomed like peonies” and “At that moment, the girl – the most alluring creature I’ve ever seen, stepped angelically into our artificial winter.” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Bound by Blue, by Meg Tuite

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Bound by Blue

 

Sententia Books

186 pages, $15

 

Review by Sara Lippmann

 

The title delivers.  Bound by Blue is everything it promises to be – a haunting, heady collection about those shackled, bound by their individual brand of blue – pain, aching sorrow, screaming memories of childhood trauma.  Meg Tuite takes on the awful, the tormented, and the twisted like no other writer. Her characters are not ones to seek out for a moonlight stroll or to cozy up beside on the couch for a breezy rom-com. They can be terrible, but we understand them as survivors; they have suffered from and remain inextricably tied to the brutal, never-ending cycle of abuse. Even when they are unforgivable they are human. The thirteen stories feel almost feral, boldly defying conventional norms with lyrical complexity and startling imagery.  Tuite’s prose is fearless and fanged, exquisite in detail – mirroring the barbed edges of her characters whose nightmares stalk them long into dawn.

Hurt is everywhere. Almost all of Tuite’s characters are victims of unspeakable acts inflicted upon them by mothers, fathers, random boys, local men, and other family members. A go-getter medical student is ruled by her eating disorder, the outgrowth of a savage backwoods assault. A grown man gouges out his eye, irrevocably ruined by his own mother’s sexual coercions.  A child tears out her own tooth as a cry for help against her older brother’s friend, a predatory neighbor.  A caretaker to an elderly man is haunted by the cries of a demented, downstairs tenant.  A delusional housewife can’t escape the damage of a destructive marriage and a childhood rape. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, by Ryan Werner

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Any Truth

Passenger Side Books

28 pages, $4

 

Review by Jonathan Russell Clark

 

 

In his essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace describes what he calls “Image-Fiction” as writing that “uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about “real,” albeit pop-mediated, characters.” He cites as a practitioner of the art Mark Leyner, whose 1990 book My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist contains lines like, “I had just been fired from McDonald’s for refusing to wear a kilt during production launch week for their new McHaggis sandwich.”

Leyner’s novel and Wallace’s essay popped into my mind as I read Ryan Werner’s If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, which seems to me both a throwback to that style and a cautious update of it. Like Leyner, Werner’s stories are filled with oddballs, off-kilter occurrences and pop references. And Werner also shares with Leyner an ability to distill a situation in very few words. One of Werner’s stories opens like this: “I didn’t marry a girl named Florence and then she won the lottery. That’s not the way I tell it but it sure is the way she tells it, like they’re related, like there couldn’t be one without the other.”  Not only is this a very funny line, it’s also remarkably economical––an entire relationship dynamic is established in a handful of words. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Doll Palace by Sara Lippman

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Doll Palace

 

 

Dock Street Press

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

 

Every story in Sara Lippmann’s debut collection, Doll Palace, is a finely crafted, stark distillation of a different kind of loss, loneliness, or alienation. A motley of bleak quests for happiness in a world of irony, desolation, and shabbiness, the collection features the seedy-carney side of beach towns, broken relationships, families reckoning with their babies’ complicated and heartbreaking illnesses, a father-daughter knife throwing team, and more.

With such weighty and often off-beat topics, it’s no surprise that the tone of the collection swerves toward the melancholic at times. The story that left me with the most cheer was “Houseboy,” narrated by an immigrant working for a ridiculously wealthy man. The “rock-n-roll hootchie koo summer” he yearns to experience in the U.S. contrasts with the bitterness of what he’s left behind, leaving the character to conclude in his broken English, “The whole world is cry.” Still, the character’s humor and sweetness left me with humble hopes of better things for him. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Lucky Body, by Kyle Coma-Thompson

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Lucky body

Dock Street Press

158 pages, $16

 

Review by Sara Lippmann

 

The human body is a mysterious, contradictory bully of a beast. Capable of extreme cruelty, of exercising raging pain, humiliation, and destruction upon others, it also is an emotional vessel of hope and love, the tender home of the brain, the spine, the heart. Is the body ever knowable? And what’s inside – can all that ever be understood? In his brilliant and remarkably strange debut collection, Coma-Thompson explores these questions, examining the complicated and conflicting impulses of the human body, and the human collective through divergent lenses. The result is a daring, beguiling body of work unlike any other that demands your attention. Read The Lucky Body slowly, then reread it again and again.

The opening and title story sets the tone of the book. “The Lucky Body” has been brutally murdered and mutilated. Who was the body? Conjecture follows, accruing like an incantation, an ode to the body, what it might have been, who it was, the life it might have once contained.  “It might have attended one of the better boarding schools in the upper Northeast.”  Also possible: “A series of women had loved the body for its many perfections, but also for the gentleness with which it inhabited: the warmth coming off its naked length.” Coma-Thompson is also a poet, and his stunning lyricism is evident throughout, such as in this passage that describes the motivation for the hunt and capture, the subsequent killing:

 The body had walked this earth as one of the lucky, and because of that an ineffable glow radiated from every part of it, and it was this they spotted one day and followed for three blocks and admiring it made plans to eventually snatch it off the streets and mine it for what they imagined was its hidden gold. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Consummation of Dirk, by Jonathan Callahan

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dirk

Starcherone Books

333 pages, $16.00

 

Review by: Michael Christian

 

The stories in Jonathan Callahan’s collection The Consummation of Dirk, winner of the eighth Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, for all their stylistic variation, often circle back around to meditations on suicide and depression; however, they offer readers maximalist descriptions and rambling coherence that when delivered via a serious intellect, bring singular, rewarding literary pleasure. Callahan intertwines dense, delicious, cake-like layers of Shakespearian allusion, train-based self-destruction, and easily the most compelling Dirk Nowitzki[1]-centric fiction I’ve ever read:

On horseback a young Dirk Nowitzki races teammate Steven Nash down a thin strip of floury sand along the lapping shallow of some sub-tropical sea, the duo’s long hair flapping like matched manes in wind.

Speaking of cerebral authors, it’s unsurprising that, in his sizable essay published in The Collagist exploring the prose styles of authors like Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, and David Foster Wallace, Callahan reveals that Wallace “was [his] hero. He seemed to bring to bear on the problem both an almost inexhaustible ability to make scintillating sentences and a clear-eyed understanding of what that ability ought to be for.” The desire to pick up Wallace’s fallen torch and carry it to some abstract, glorious finish line is present throughout. Continue reading →

Beneath the Liquid Skin, By Berit Ellingsen (A Review By Simon Jacobs)

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firthFORTH Books

108 pgs./$10.95

Towards the end of this collection’s first story, Berit Ellingsen writes, “We need to be something else again.” We begin in uncertainty at the point of dissolve, as things change, and it is this unease, this perpetual state of transition that drives Ellingsen’s brilliant, undulating and mysterious first short story collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin.

The book begins with the aforementioned “Sliding,” the inevitable drift into winter, and ends in a duet, “The White,” which chronicles the journey of “you,” a logistics assistant who treks from a research base into the vast, shifting whiteness of the Antarctic landscape, and finds wholeness and home, the universality of everything in the ice and snow. This is followed by “Anthropocene,” describing, in fierce, poetic language, a frigid apocalypse on our age, dragging everything into the center, when “you” and “I” are torn apart in fire and ice, only to begin again:

This is where it ends: in a concrete hall between reticent, snow-burdened mountains, under a mute sky the color of forgetfulness, snow falling like soot, and the air so frigid that every metal object tears the skin from your fingers. The lashing nettle-wind shrieks and tries every door and hollow window frame, like a burglar at night, clinking across the floor’s lake of glass shards. The red-rusted ley lines with rows of disc-shaped insulators curve into the sky and sing of legacies misspent and lost, of eternal life squandered. Continue reading →

Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand ( A Review by Helen McClory)

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Small Beer Press

286 pgs/$16.00

There’s a sense of wholeness to Errantry: Strange Stories which makes it appear, at first, easy to discuss. The subheading is ‘Strange Stories’ and strange they are. Ten stories make up this collection, ten distinct but obviously blood-related kin. Each populated by wonderstruck onlookers or sinister, eccentric figures. Each set in places – Woodlands, coast, mountains, cityscapes – that are uncertain grounds, warped by mysterious forces, but rich in realistic detail. There is a sense of accrual in each story. But what is being accrued is a sense of long lasting dis-ease. An enthrallment that is hard to shake or find out the edges of.

It’s no wonder that one of the stories in the collection won the Shirley Jackson Award. Like Jackson’s work, there is a claustrophobic creepiness to almost every story, despite the wonders. Hand’s stories here are more expansive, yet have that undercurrent of a formless force closing in, be it weather, or birds gathering in a falling evening sky. For the scope of this review, I’d like to focus mostly on the award-winning story above, my favourite of the ten, ‘Near Zennor’. Continue reading →

Tell Everyone I Said Hi by Chad Simpson (A Review by Dawn West)

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University of Iowa Press

124 pgs/$16.00

I was born and raised and still live in Ohio. As a Midwest girl, I can say that Chad Simpson’s earnest yet tough story collection Tell Everyone I Said Hi does the region right. Simpson’s emotionally complex characters live in Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, and they’re all aching with this bruised hope, this blue yearning. They could be people we love. They could be us.

In one of the first stories, “You Would’ve Counted Yourself Lucky,” we meet a pre-teen playing with a flashlight in his backyard, waiting for his missing sister. Before he ventures outside the boy passes by his parents, who don’t notice him at all.

         In the living room, the boy’s mom holds her drink in the air and says in this defeated way to the boy’s dad, “Could you maybe just add a couple ice cubes to this?”

The boy’s dad rises from his chair and says, “Sure.”

We meet the boy at a pivotal time in his life. We all know puberty is a total douchebag—add to that his distracted parents and his presently-missing sister. This boy is terrifically curious and lacerated with loneliness. We follow him into the oddly intimate encounter he has with the once-beautiful teen girl next door, who is partially paralyzed because of a car accident.

          Rebecca picks up the boy’s fingers again and moves his hand down her leg to her calf. There is a divot the size and shape of a small football where doctors have taken skin at the back of her calf, and she sets his fingers inside it. The skin there is cool and completely hairless. It feels smooth in a way that skin shouldn’t. Continue reading →