Heidi von Palleske’s peculiar "Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack" is a novel in which nothing is incidental and aberrations abound. The audience is required, from the get-go, to do some of the driving in this story; the reader’s... Read More

Laura Newman’s short story collection "The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies" features complex plots, covers considerable time and geographical space, and includes deep characters and relationships. Authentic historical,... Read More

Eddy Boudel Tan’s debut novel "After Elias", whose climatic prologue is arresting, rides on a trajectory wherein every mystery solved begets a dozen more. Coen Caraway descends upon Isla de Espejos several days before his groom-to-be... Read More

Sharon Harrigan’s "Half" mimics the triumphant defects of every family in its excavations of the peculiar remains of one. Narrated through the entwined perceptions and insights of identical twins, seldom heard by anyone other than the... Read More

Buried beneath The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires’s mounds of Southern-style humor and horrific plot twists ripples a coming-of-age story featuring the least likely of heroines. When real, imagined, and metaphorical... Read More

Matt Tompkins’s "Odsburg" is a unique kind of story—almost too novel to be considered a novel at all. Within it, self-taught researcher Wallace Jenkins-Ross sets out to document the town of Odsburg. The data he accumulates is... Read More

In Sion Dayson’s "As a River", Greer makes a valiant attempt to outrun his past, but this surface story belies a powerful undertow that transforms his return to Bannen, Georgia, and its anything-but-lazy Sicama River into a more... Read More

"Hummingbird in Underworld" is a treasure of a book in multiple ways. It flits back and forth over razor-wire fences, twining memories from life on the outside into Deborah Tobola’s account of her stretch as facilitator of a creative... Read More