"Near Haven" takes on the apocalypse with literary flair and shining prose. In "Near Haven", by Matthew Stephen Sirois, a looming apocalypse puts life into perspective. This is a contemplative and violently engaging character study. In... Read More

Klonaris uses memory and dialogue as valuable tools to convey her stories, introducing a compelling voice to short fiction. The characters in Helen Klonaris’s If I Had Wings grow up in the Greek-Bahamian neighborhoods of the Bahamas, a... Read More

With quirky yet compelling intelligence, "Queen of Spades" creates its own small, interconnected universe. Michael Shou-Yung Shum’s entrancing "Queen of Spades" enters the fictional realm of the Royal Casino, located on the outskirts... Read More

These voices possess a fragile resilience even as they surrender themselves to fate, new knowledge, and other bodies. Adolescents and adults on the brink of critical self-awareness define "What Counts as Love", winner of the John Simmons... Read More

Fanciful stories within the story are enjoyable all on their own. Kathryn Donahue’s The Dog Walker’s Diary is a smart and complex take on modern-day relationship dynamics that utilizes a story-within-a-story framework. When busy Los... Read More

Sympathy is created for these disparate and complex characters in a way that is worth savoring. Set in the late 1990s, Heather Bell Adams’s Marantha Road takes a seemingly standard setup of Southern poverty literature and burnishes it... Read More

No relationship is easy to maintain, but this story is a heartfelt exploration of the ways in which relationships are absolutely necessary. Danielle M. Wong’s "Swearing off Stars" details the life of Lia Cole, an American studying... Read More

Brutal honesty wins out over artifice in this story of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes, despite the best preparations we make: levees break, defenses fall. Such vulnerabilities are an overarching theme of C. Morgan... Read More