Book Review: Tornado Season
Prepare to Be Taken to New, Uncharted Places in Your Mind Courtney Craggett’s vivid imagination will take you to strange and unusual places, but there also is a thread of familiarity that runs through her stories. Kansas Before Oz and Statue provide an escape from reality into a world of fantasy, while Donation and Astromorphosis […]
Featured Indie Bookstore: Women & Children First
Women & Children First opened in a modest storefront in 1979, owned by Ann Christophersen and Linda Bubon, who met as graduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Over the years we’ve been located in several locations on Chicago’s northside. In 1990, we moved to our current location in the Andersonville neighborhood. We […]
Book Review: A Thread So Fine.
Love Is the Thread That Holds This Family Together During Hard Times For the Malone family, 1946 was a year of ignorant bliss. World War II was over and Ed, the oldest of the three children, was coming home. Shannon, the middle child, and Eliza, the youngest (who had moved up a grade years earlier), […]
Book Review: My Real Name is Hanna.
An Emotional, Yet Gratifying, Story of Perseverance, Love and Sacrifice My Name Is Hannah is a beautiful but heart-wrenching story of a Ukrainian Jewish family that was forced into hiding to avoid being victims of the Holocaust. A fiction novel, Tara Lynn Masih’s saga is based on an all-too-real family and true events of the […]
What to Read in YA Fiction: Short Stuff.
This collection of four short stories celebrates the magic of the meet-cute! Edited by Constantine, this anthology featuring LGBTQ+ characters, specifically those who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual, includes stories from five authors: Julia Ember, Katie Fierro, Jude Sierra, Tom Wilinsky, and Jen Sternick. Wilinsky and Sternick set the tone for the collection with […]
Recommended Reading: The Gnome Stories.
READ AN EXCERPT Excerpt from “Our Song” by Ander Monson Copyright © 2020 by Ander Monson Forthcoming in The Gnome Stories, Graywolf Press, February 2020 I no longer believe in memory and don’t believe in fire. I hold my hand to the simulated flame and anticipate the pain. Even though it’s digital it still hurts. […]
Recommended Reading: Jimtown Road: A Novel in Stories.
READ AN EXCERPT Alone in his shop, Lena on the phone, fifty miles away in her own lonely shop, she told him they thought it was breast cancer. The silence after was a roar in his head. Cancer in those days meant dead. 1961. “Are they sure?” “How the hell can I get breast cancer?” […]
Recommended Reading: The Universal Physics of Escape.
READ AN EXCERPT She bends forward, pushing back a cumbersome, invasive purse (which frequently distresses her by banging into people in crowds, ruining her otherwise perfect unobtrusiveness, but which she nonetheless carries because it is a gift, and expensive, and holds an entire magazine without the need to fold it) and sees in the tank […]
Recommended Reading: Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses.
READ AN EXCERPT Excerpt from “We Are Meant for Greater Things” From Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses by Jen Julian Winner of the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction This girl, she’s one of those people you hear about nowadays, living her life for the second time around. She’s a slack-faced, dream-eyed sister, born—twice […]
Recommended Reading: The Lightness of Water & Other Stories.
READ AN EXCERPT Clinton came from good quarreling stock. William and Macie Slade’s bickering, arguments, and barbed debates were the stuff of local legend. After one infamous fight in which his mother had thrown a whole roasted chicken at his father’s head, Clinton had asked his father why he didn’t just leave and marry someone […]