-Reviewed by Cath Barton- I was tempted to start this review by trying to write a recipe for a successful story, because it’s with a recipe that Nikesh Shukla begins each chapter of his short novella, The Time Machine; but I knew that mine would probably be hackneyed, whereas his are as fresh and fragrant…
-Reviewed by Andie Berryman- Unsettled is a novella from the Indimyth category of Indireads, a collective of South Asian authors writing fiction depicting modern day struggles between heritage and the burgeoning economic, Western-influenced values in contemporary South Asia. The novella interweaves the stories of Divya and Raghav, a married middle class professional couple in modern…
-By Richard T. Watson- A generation or more grew up in the Cold War shadow of the Bomb, fearing the effects of the nuclear technology that was the focus of an arms race between the world’s two superpowers. But it’s unlikely that any of them were affected in quite the same way as Yerzhan, the…
-Reviewed by Eleanor Hemsley- The Hospital is a story filled with gritty reality about the health system in the early 21st century. We follow a health care worker through a short period in his life where he wants to escape, and journey with him as he tries to get out of a job he’s not…
-Reviewed by Rebecca Burns- Niagara by Evangeline Jennings is a short, stand-alone story, around 10,000 words in length and divided into two sections. Jennings launches straight into the story with a description of Ellie, the central character. The portrait is pitted and sharp, immediately conveying Ellie’s unhappy life: If there was one thing Eleanor hated…
-Reviewed by Adrian Slatcher- David Rawson’s Fuckhead is a fascinating novella/essay about two brothers. The narrator has VATER syndrome, a series of complex birth deformities, which create a lifetime of otherness – as he battles with having no anus, club foot, and a range of other disabilities. His brother is recently in remission from cancer, and…
-Reviewed by Holly Jazz Kotzé- Jenalyn is the eponymous story of a young woman from the Philippines and before I go any further with this review, I would just like to say, reading this just a week after the super-tornado Haiyan, how pertinent it is. In the story Jenalyn and her family are from the…
-Reviewed by David Sheridan- Whew. Just let me sit down a second, catch my breath. Whew, okay, yeah. That was Mason Johnson’s Sad Robot Stories, a free PDF (donation if you’re feeling so inclined) published by the Chicago Centre for Literature and Photography, and absolutely nothing to do with any other sad stories featuring robots…
-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson- You’ve heard, I’m sure, of Charles Darwin. You might not have heard of Thomas Davies, who, in Kristina Carlson’s Finnish novella, looks after the great man’s garden as he whiles away his twilight years of the 1870s in the Kentish village of Downe. But neither man is really the focus…
-Reviewed by David Sheridan- In one interview, Dan Holloway revels in the moment when a member of his reading group told him: ‘the emperor has no clothes’ – because that’s what people always say about conceptual art. He concludes, therefore, that he must be doing something right with Evie and Guy, his numbers-only ‘novel’. I…