Flash Fiction America
The stories come and go quick, as is the way with flash, but they also linger, creating one more mysterious, satisfying paradox for readers to hold.
Fiction
The Way to Freedom in Jacqueline Crooks’s Fire Rush
Jacqueline Crooks’s novel is a journey from underworlds to natural worlds, from the present to the past, and from secrets to finding one’s voice. Layered in are elements of history and ancestry; of longing for mothers and motherlands; of oppression and uprising; and of the historical, sociopolitical, and spiritual power of music.
Drifting Shared Memories in I Went to See My Father
The narrative tends to drift, partly because of its emphasis on memory and partly because of the soft flow of Shin’s syntax, expertly translated by Hur.
Disaster Capitalism in Birnam Wood
No generation is immune from the Birnam Wood‘s ire. Idealistic millennials are frauds, Gen X-ers are technocratic looters, Boomers are oblivious resource hoarders. Yet it’s not just the premise that everyone is fatally flawed that generates such intense and oppressive pessimism; rather, it’s that everyone in the novel is so deeply unlikable as well.
Endless Grief in Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio
Sámano Córdova asks readers to imagine cheating death even for a little bit, even if we know it will all go wrong, even if we know the second grief can only be worse.
Constant Contradictions in Nazlı Koca’s The Applicant
With its clipped, direct sentences and its abundance of resonant questions, long and short, Koca’s prose mirrors this narrative doubleness—giving readers an experience that is both irresistibly consumable yet compellingly durable.
Throwing Bodies in Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night
Mariana Enríquez moves past a superficial top layer of social commentary as quickly as possible to embroil the reader in the true horror at the core of her epic: the responsibility foisted upon those who inherit the history to watch the horrible truth slowly come to light.
The Perils of Freedom in How to Turn into a Bird
How to Turn into a Bird María José Ferrada Tin House | December 6, 2022 Ramón, the protagonist in How to Turn into a Bird, is not like the others. He left his job working long hours at the factory. He no longer lives within the thin walls of his apartment complex with his young…
Inhabiting Past Ancestors in Animal Life
Animal Life is a subtle and stunning work for anyone who has felt the impact of an ancestor, who has lost themselves to a past that feels like their own.