Before the Internet, there were zines: xeroxed pages combining comics with collage and held together by staples and passion. Strictly appealing to long tail market segments, zines were never about money. They were about expression. They... Read More

The twenty-six fathers narrating the alphabetized “chapters” of Matt Bell’s "Cataclysm Baby" rope themselves to the reader, pulling him toward worlds where “fists of black hail fall from the cloudless sky and spatter the house,... Read More

A short story collection is like a meal. How it’s consumed depends on the reader. A lazy Sunday afternoon can vanish as one enjoys a literary dim sum, sampling from this or that part of the book as pages flip by like waiters with trays... Read More

G.M. Holder’s ridiculously accomplished debut novel begins with a series of maps. Maps of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and the larger territory of former Yugoslavia offer a sample of the settings in this sprawling book and prepare readers... Read More

The novel opens with Swain, a one-armed juggler, watching from the wings of a theater as Jonson and his boy dance atop wooden barrels. They are all performers in a small-town vaudeville circuit where a runaway donkey has been known to... Read More

Dear Reader, Sid Straw, barely recovered after a break-up, moves from Baltimore to Southern California to take a mid-level computer sales job from which he is promptly fired. Along the way he is publicly defamed, defrauded, embarrassed,... Read More

Judith Kitchen’s new memoir, Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate, kicks off with the following disclaimer: “I have never owned a camera and I never snap photos, except reluctantly when asked by others.” It’s an odd way... Read More

Boston writer Nicholas Lamar Soutter acknowledges in his new novel, "The Water Thief", the canon of dystopian works, with clever allusions to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, an ending homage to George Orwell’s 1984, and a brilliant... Read More