Short story collection offers up a cast of diverse, unique, and misunderstood characters each struggling with the consequences of misguided love. The epigraph for A. Igoni Barrett’s first story collection, Love is Power, or Something... Read More

Townsend writes lovingly of the Italian world in a love story about questioning of values and ideals. Love, thirty-something Jamie believes, does not give someone claim to her soul. And Jamie, the protagonist of Jackie Townsend’s novel... Read More

There are times when you’re on the outskirts—of people, situations, or stories—and you know that to plunge ahead means your heart may get a little broken. But you do it anyway, because the taste of something true is too much to... Read More

“69752. That was his phone number … he had it tattooed there, on his left forearm, so he wouldn’t forget it. That’s what my grandfather told me. And that’s what I grew up believing. In the 1970s, telephone numbers in Guatemala... Read More

This is certainly one way to go out: “My casket shall be filled to the rim with 2005 Saint-Émilion.” But in Michel Bruneau’s "The Emancipating Death of a Boring Engineer" that is only the beginning of the requests from recently... Read More

There are versions of the South that sell glossy magazines. And then there’s the South itself: a little bit grittier, a little less polite. More fighting and less showering, more guzzling and less sipping As editor Tom Franklin... Read More

“It didn’t matter to Ray if they were for or against the war. He just couldn’t take listening to someone who hadn’t been there. They didn’t belong to the same fraternity, the one that had taken his youth and made him bitter... Read More

Frank W. Dixon, the narrator of Ted Heller’s satirical novel Pocket Kings, is not someone you want to play a lot of poker with. He’s really good at it. He is also not related to the author of The Hardy Boys detective series, though... Read More