Foreword INDIE
2023 BRONZE Winner for Short Stories
Book Review
Unswerving
In Barbara Ridley’s gripping novel "Unswerving", a woman survives a car accident and contends with emotional trauma, harrowing rehabilitation, and a mystery surrounding the fate of her girlfriend. Tave, once a top athlete at her...
Book Review
The Only Way Through Is Out
In her candid, inspirational memoir "The Only Way Through Is Out", Suzette Mullen traces the events leading to her midlife coming out—and her decision to leave her marriage, choosing “desire over safety.” As an empty-nester, while...
Book Review
Cravings
by Elaine Chiew
In Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s expansive short story collection, some form of craving—either literal or metaphysical—factors into every person’s tale. A woman who craved olives as a child is forever cursed to flashback through the...
Book Review
Dry Land
As humans wage war on each other and on nature, a visionary Wisconsin forester discovers a poisoned gift within himself in B. Pladek’s historical novel "Dry Land". Rand trained to be a forester after losing his beloved marshland to...
Book Review
The Summers
by Karen Rigby
In Ronya Othmann’s captivating novel "The Summers", a German Yazidi girl comes of age in a time of political crisis. Syria is “found on maps, globes, and official documents,” but Leyla, who spends summers there with her...
Book Review
Shopping, or The End of Time
A child of Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, a mother of three in Bolivia, Emily Bludworth de Barrios comes at her work from all directions at once, with a frenzied takedown of parental angst, violence against women, existential hopelessness,...