The title novella of Harrison’s new collection is worth the price of admission itself. The Beast God Forgot to Invent is a fine example of mid-length fiction: engaging, surprising, intelligent and sophisticated in an off-handed way,... Read More

“Hit them pines wildman, hit them pines,” Davis hollers as he creates a scene from Stanley Easter. A scene that is recreated in each listener’s brain, and is as vivid and individual as the person listening cares to allow. That’s... Read More

Even if truth is stranger than fiction, Townsend has been giving truth a run for its money in the person of Adrian Mole, her fictitious English diarist whose life and predicaments were nicely captured in his self-description from an... Read More

A two-sentence biographical aside in Suetonius—how Julius Caesar, age twenty-five, en route to Rhodes, was abducted by pirates, ransomed and released, then revenged when, still as a private citizen, he confiscated his captors’ bounty... Read More

Carving out a niche in the world of fiction with what has been referred to as a corporate nightmare or management novel, Kemske has written his fifth novel and fourth of this new genre—Labor Day. A union headquarters is the backdrop... Read More

Emmaline Goldman Grosvenor is twenty-eight, a Hollywood writer who laces her conversation with profanity and her life with insights into the condition of loneliness, the state of television writing, and the difficulties of life in... Read More

This tale has such heartfelt realism that the reader might confuse it with nonfiction. The book is cleverly written in first person with the prologue immediately focusing on the plight of whether the earth is “renewed or destroyed”... Read More

Short story collections are tricky beasts, mixing many lives in a unifying style, be the tone wry, solemn, anxious, or deadpan. In this, her second collection after The Circles I Move In, Lefer might be narrating a museum’s audiotape,... Read More