-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…
-Reviewed by Ian Chung- Published as a Kindle Single on Amazon by Dead Ink, Danny Broderick’s The Ruins is a short story whose impact primarily derives from how it subverts the reader’s expectations regarding certain storytelling genres. The narrative begins in media res as a sort of spy thriller: ‘The woman was stripping the prisoner,…
-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson- Everything I’ve heard about the Holocaust leads me think that Auschwitz was the worst – or at least the deadliest – of the Nazi extermination camps. So when I realised that Izolda, the central, Jewish, character of Hanna Krall’s Chasing the King of Hearts, was on her way to Auschwitz,…
-Robert James Russell spoke to Ian Chung- Author Bio: Robert James Russell is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author and the co-founding editor of the literary journal Midwestern Gothic. His work has appeared in Joyland, The Collagist, Gris-Gris, Thunderclap! Magazine,, and LITSNACK, among others. Sea of Trees (Winter Goose Publishing, 2012) is his first novella. What inspired…
-Reviewed by Claudia Haberberg- I cannot help but feel that the title of Neil Fraser Addison’s I Think We Should Both Start Seeing Other Worlds is a little misleading. With a title like that, I would have expected…well…more worlds. Not necessarily literal other worlds or planets, but perhaps a few more diverse conceptual locations to…
-Reviewed by Nick Sweeney- The Middle is a short, powerful book about journeys, both actual and metaphorical, through hope and failure, but ultimately towards the suggestion, at least, of some kind of redemption. The characters, a boy – actually in his late teens – a man who feels the breath of middle age on his…
-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson- In the absence of words and common language, much of human communication happens through non-verbal means: body language, gestures and looks, for example. So it seems right that Sally Ashton’s debut novella, Controller, which follows its protagonist into an alien and foreign city whose language she learns as she goes…
-Reviewed by Charlotte Barnes- If my reading career has taught me anything, it is that for a book to survive in the current publishing climate, it needs to bring something extraordinary and unique to the reading audience. Jason Rolfe’s bold and experimental novella, Synthetic Saints, certainly caters to this industry requirement. The futuristic text catapults…