The twenty-six fathers narrating the alphabetized “chapters” of Matt Bell’s "Cataclysm Baby" rope themselves to the reader, pulling him toward worlds where “fists of black hail fall from the cloudless sky and spatter the house,... Read More

William Cobb daringly dips his pen into the inkwells of past, present, and future, and comes up with a story that is at once gritty and gripping, portentous yet promising, raw but redemptive. When we meet seventeen-year-old Ruby Cole, a... Read More

“I have been watching your country … and have to admit that in many respects you are perfect … What a person of culture cannot endure is that you live without heart, without the salt and sense of life.” So complains Gulliver,... Read More

A short story collection is like a meal. How it’s consumed depends on the reader. A lazy Sunday afternoon can vanish as one enjoys a literary dim sum, sampling from this or that part of the book as pages flip by like waiters with trays... Read More

G.M. Holder’s ridiculously accomplished debut novel begins with a series of maps. Maps of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and the larger territory of former Yugoslavia offer a sample of the settings in this sprawling book and prepare readers... Read More

The novel opens with Swain, a one-armed juggler, watching from the wings of a theater as Jonson and his boy dance atop wooden barrels. They are all performers in a small-town vaudeville circuit where a runaway donkey has been known to... Read More

Dear Reader, Sid Straw, barely recovered after a break-up, moves from Baltimore to Southern California to take a mid-level computer sales job from which he is promptly fired. Along the way he is publicly defamed, defrauded, embarrassed,... Read More

This debut novel from Lyle Blake Smythers is a quest fantasy featuring poet and warrior Catalan and his band of mercenaries. On their way back from an assassination, the group chances upon a barely breathing young man named Talin, to... Read More