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Thrown Kerry Howley Sarabande Books, 2014 282 pages Buy: book | ebook Being intimate with some sports is far from a guarantee that one is even acquainted with all of them. Personally I’ve never wanted to watch a single mixed-martial arts fight until reading Kerry Howley’s Thrown, a page-turner that has a lot to teach…
Throughout our youth we’re hard-wired to look to the adults in our lives for ideas of who we want to be. Who we are, though, often seeks to establish itself in spite of those desires. Stefanie Freele’s flash fiction piece “Davenports and Ottomans” (Tahoma Literary Review Vol. 2, No. 1) explores this tension through a…
In the town where I grew up, Newtown, Connecticut, the town hall, the library, and a school all stood as monuments to the generosity of one benefactress, Mary Elizabeth Hawley. They were named after various members of her family and built in that 1920s/30s style meant to evoke stony permanence. Mary had an unusual life…
The Sellout — Paul Beatty Farrar, Straus & Giroux March 2015 304 pages Buy now I sat down to read Paul Beatty’s new satirical novel The Sellout knowing I was going to write about it. In fact, I had committed to writing about it. I had pitched it; it was my idea. This knowledge, in conjunction with the book’s…
One day eighteen years ago, a senior colleague at the small South Carolina college where I taught found more than $300,000 worth of stripped Penguin paperbacks at a local thrift shop. Other than the piece of each cover that had been sliced off, the books were in excellent condition, but the prison to which they…
There are as many names for the sun as there are languages; it might be tempting to believe that each of those names, then, means the same thing. Joanna Lynne Ponce’s story “Café con Leche” (Clackamas Literary Review XIX) exposes how critical language can be in giving definition to an object, or a person. The…
Spring is in the air, and good books are in our hearts! Read on for our picks for this spring’s best literary offerings. Night At The Fiestas Kirstin Valdez Quade Norton, March 23 $26 Buy: book ∣ebook Kirstin Valdez Quade is one of the National Book Foundation’s 5-Under-35 honorees, and her debut story collection…
I read Kyle Dargan’s poem “Goliath” the night of the Baltimore riots. I was in Mexico City where the images of the riots made it to the Mexican presses before the story did—Freddie Gray, the police beatings, his snapped spinal cord. The details simply hadn’t been translated yet. But the beautiful thing about a riot, anywhere…
There’s a wonderful history of short stories where a character’s physical ills work as a metaphor representing larger problems, both personal and societal. For instance, in Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Lady in Paris,” the protagonist regularly vomits live rabbits, a reality we come to realize not only provides the reasons why an apartment has…
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