Poet Ted Kooser’s refreshingly compact meditation on his youth in Eastern Iowa is an essential addition to the growing number of prose autobiographical works by established Midwestern poets (see Mary Swander’s The Desert Pilgrim and... Read More

By necessity, short story writers must craft details with precision, distilling a character into a few spot-on sentences. This is a skill well-honed in Jill McCorkle’s work, and although she plays with larger themes throughout the... Read More

There are shifting secrets hidden in the endless pockets of sand and rubble that provide a great deal of the atmosphere in Anne Sanow’s fascinating book "Triple Time". And yet, human intrigue persists as well, when the action moves to... Read More

Like the Ripley stories of Patricia Highsmith, some fiction invites us to inhabit the mind of an amoral sociopath. "Pariah", Dave Zeltzerman’s latest crime novel, asks us to make ourselves at home inside the skin of one Kyle Nevin. Not... Read More

“The only subject of fiction is time,” author Stuart Dybek once noted; Steve Tomasula’s latest novel, "TOC", a “new-media” novel available only on DVD, takes this idea literally, and presents it in a cutting-edge medium... Read More

"When Autumn Leaves", the title of Amy Foster’s debut novel, refers not to Johnny Mercer’s song of lost love, but to the gentle and wise witch Autumn Avening, who has been notified of a promotion and has to select her successor from... Read More

"The Reluctant Daughter" opens as a bittersweet modern comedy of manners about generational conflict. There’s an unemotional, chain-smoking mother, a father who keeps trying to keep order, and a lesbian daughter. But this daughter... Read More

“A wolf’s howl” of a winter wind awakens Carol in her Manhattan apartment. She senses that some-thing is terribly wrong with her twenty-one-year-old son, Jonas. Unable to shake that feeling of dread, she is sure that her son would... Read More