Finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, Stacy Tintocalis’s debut collection exposes the remnants of apple pie America. The book renders an unsettled contemporary world with characters who try to reconcile their past. The scenes take... Read More

Linda LeGarde Grover knows how to end a story—and manages to achieve both circularity and closure in each and every one. This is an impressive feat in and of itself, but for a collection of linked stories like "The Dance Boots", which... Read More

Most everyone faces this dilemma at some point: feeling compelled to help someone in desperate need, but knowing that the cost of doing so is high. And when the person in trouble is a child, the difficulty intensifies. This is the... Read More

“Here are cool shadows and silence and stone, tile painted by the fall of light through stained glass.” James Dressler has sought refuge in the Catholic Church since his youth. It is his sanctuary from a tumultuous home life, and a... Read More

Secrets corrode and divide; truths heal and unite. This concept is gracefully explored in first-time novelist Peter Geye’s lyric story of familial strife and re-conciliation, "Safe from the Sea". Called home by his dying father after... Read More

It would take no less than a poet with an evolved spirit and keen sense of history to add new insights on the Holocaust. Andre Schwarz-Bart (1928–2006), a Polish Jew whose parents and brothers were victims of the Nazis, was just such a... Read More

“My disgust had a smell: the smell from the hospital, from the apartment—the telltale odor of death. My heart raced. I could feel them behind me: a thirsty pack, their hunger, a thick tongue of horror, snatching at my back, creeping... Read More

Like the “Okies” immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the impoverished Oklahoma farmers in William Cunningham’s 1935 novel understand that unchecked capitalism leaves the rich as bloated as the flies feasting on the... Read More