"The Heart of War" by national policy veteran Kathleen McInnis is part office drama, part foible-filled romp through the US’s military bureaucracy. When Dr. Heather Reilly arrives at the Pentagon to work as an academic fellow, she... Read More

Lars Petter Sveen’s "Children of God", translated by Guy Puzey, collects stories featuring the New Testament’s marginal people. On the edge of the Roman empire, a place where everything is “so mixed up, so confusing … that it... Read More

“How easily the fictions that a closed circle of people told each other could grow wings, take flight as if they were the truth,” declares “Deception,” the opening story in Anita Felicelli’s "Love Songs for a Lost Continent".... Read More

Melanie Hobson’s "Summer Cannibals" is a vibrant, vicious family portrait in which three adult daughters come home. The family matriarch, Margaret, has summoned everyone to rally around her very pregnant daughter, Pippa. The girls’... Read More

Governor John Bel Edwards appointed Jack B. Bedell as Louisiana’s poet laureate in 2017; if that decision is reflective of all of his others during his time in office, he’ll go down in history as one of Louisiana’s best. This... Read More

Our president would like us to believe Mexicans are rapists, Libyans are terrorists, and a wall on the southern border will solve all our problems. His goal is to dehumanize brown- and black-skinned people, and his millions of supporters... Read More

Daniel DiFranco’s intimate novel "Panic Years" follows a twelve-week tour of everywhere-but-nowhere, through tiny clubs, on filthy stages, and across long stretches of highway. Life as a gigging musician is rough. Twenty-eight-year-old... Read More

Is Merilyn Simonds’s "Refuge" a fictional memoir, a historical novel, or an exploration of the causes and results of seeking refuge? It’s all three, as it turns out, and a mystery besides. Questions hover over ninety-six-year-old... Read More