The ten stories in Andrew Malan Milward’s "The Agriculture Hall of Fame" are set in “the center of the center of America”: Kansas. And they are all, in their own unique ways, wild, hopeful, and devastating. From “Quail Haven,... 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

The characters in Michael Jeffrey Lee’s "Something in My Eye" come out from under all sorts hiding places—a slaughterhouse floor, a whorehouse, a couch by the edge of a river, even hell. It’s these characters that compelled... Read More

The quote is well-worn: “It’s the journey that matters.” Dagoberto Gilb’s appropriately titled new collection—*Before the End, After the Beginning—*gives us ten such adventures. And Gilb should know a thing or two about... Read More

Ogden Walker—biracial, former Marine, sheriff’s deputy, main character in Percival Everett’s latest novel, "Assumption": a man who prefers fly fishing to firearms and violence. Or so we assume. Everett’s prose is stark, so plain... Read More

Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Award for Short Fiction, the stories in "Out of Time", are tethered to complicated relationships and losses, often swaying in and out of reality. “Tangle Apple Flesh” begins as “Cooper sat naked... Read More

“When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign.” In Hillary Jordan’s dystopian novel When She Woke, Hannah Payne is a Red, a criminal. Chroming—the genetic altering of skin... Read More

Suzanne Kamata’s collection of stories "The Beautiful One Has Come" explores the tension, and sometimes beauty, of straddling two very different cultures. In some cases this takes a very physical form, like being an American mother in... Read More