by Ben Murphy Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) by Thalia Field. NY: Solid Objects, 2016. pp. 264 The parenthetical subtitle of Thalia Field’s new book reads like a fallacious marketing designation—a label slapped on to tease the booksellers who have … Read more

by JOHN BLAIR . . . for charitable prayers/ Shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her. . . .                                                      Hamlet: Act 5, Scene 1 Ophelia, lodged, fictive and unsanctified in her Danish dirt still waits for the … Read more

by ROBERT MAYNOR I knew what my brother would do before I called him. That’s why I’d put it off for so long. JD is not a moderate kind of man, and he saw enough of women being mistreated when … Read more

by JOHN ILLO                   (Click image for full text.) First published in Carolina Quarterly Issue XVII in 1965, John Illo’s “The Idyll of Unreproved Pleasures Free” analyzes the controversial novel Memoirs of a Women … Read more

by JAMES ELENS The storm washed away the town on a Sunday. Moselle lay on the eastern end of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya swamp basin, fifty miles south of New Orleans. The whole town was only a dozen homes perched lined along … Read more

by Mary Scott Manning Curbside Splendor Publishing, July 2017, 185 pp. “Sometimes when in the blast radius of some catastrophic act, even the most quotidian things, the dumbest everyday shit will still be immortalized,” admits Tim Taranto. His memoir, Ars … Read more

by REBECCA LARTIGUE Judy had overdone it again, she realized, assessing the large sheet cake; she’d be eating leftovers for days.  But it didn’t matter.  Everyone was having fun, talking in their version of Early Modern English:  “Wilt thou cut … Read more

by JOHN HAGGERTY At 3:55PM I close the Threat Desk. I say “close” in the interests of accuracy, because at the inception of the Threat Desk program, when we were given a generous selection of models and options to choose … Read more

by DOREEN THIERAUF Restless Books, June 2016, 160 pp. Originally written in Spanish (2012) and masterfully translated into English by David Frye, Super Extra Grande is a genre-bending space opera as original and erudite as its author, a hair metal … Read more

by SAM BEDNARCHIK St. Louis, MO: Dorothy, a publishing project, 2017. 215 pp. By my roughly crunched count, Leonora Carrington’s complete literary output totals just over 600 pages of writing. Her Complete Stories, reissued by Dorothy in a beautiful book … Read more