TO BE held in cupped hands and passed around with wonder, the storied worlds of I ll Give You Something to Cry About constitute a grouping born of spellbinding cosmic dust. Once more assuming the mantle of Story s guardian, Corey Mesler sets to work at not only protecting and preserving, but pondering, playing, prodding, and perambulating within the bounds of narrative creation and exhaustion. Whether in the form of wife- and life-stealing bear, manuscript-eating desk, disillusioned newlywed couple, title-swapping library collection, or man bent on redefining his neurotic existence, these tales fabled, monstrous, Southern, intimate, meta, everyday, other, biblical, and minor effect a coalescence of teller and listener that is nothing short of celestial.

I'll Give You Something to Cry About: A Gathering of Stories

Literature & Fiction

Corey Mesler

Literary

Queen's Ferry Press

Much as Theodore Carter's title sea blob proves a challenge to classify, the other matters of importance in this, the author's debut, story collection emerge as equally amorphous and downright slippery when it comes to categorization. Yet, fleshy narrative makes indexing possible by way of a catalogue of characters who aren't simply arranged, but rarities that act-largely at great personal risk. From the competitive eater working against an internal clock to a disengaged young man beguiled by an animate voodoo doll, from a junior-high water-walker to an eyebrow arsonist, the affable oddities of The Life Story of a Chilean Sea Blob and Other Matters of Importance confront doubt in its multifarious forms, establishing classification-organized into engaging, compelling, and affecting-as tantamount to the anomalous lives we lead.

The Life Story of a Chilean Sea Blob and Other Matters of Importance

Carter, Theodore

We Bury the Landscape is an exhibition of literary art. Ekphrasis, collected. One hundred flash fictions and prose poems presented to view. From the visual to the textual, transmuting before the gallery-goer's gaze, the shifting contours of curator Kristine Ong Muslim's surreal panorama delineate the unconventional, the unexpected, and the unnatural. Traversing this visionary vista's panoply of "rooms of unfinished lives," the reader unearths and examines and reanimates-revealing the transcendent uncanniness that subsists underfoot.

We Bury the Landscape

Muslim, Kristine Ong

Like "snow in the tropics," this collection is a revelation. Clustered as shell-shocked survivors, Bayard Godsave's Lesser Apocalypses occupy the edge of ruin. Though bleak, the stories contained here are enlivened, emboldened, by disaster. A man emotionally undone by his time inside a missile silo, by the turn of his key; a gas mask that reflects a marriage's murkiness; a domestic bomber whose conscience ignites every fuse; a post-nuclear war refugee facing concurrent adolescence, motherhood, and middle age; and two former cosmonauts disengaged from everything but each other are all vivid against a tenebrous backdrop. Underpinned by a series of prophetic vignettes, the book's blast zones are aglow-illuminating, through stark humanity, the blazing end of devastation.

Lesser Apocalypses

Bayard Godsave

United States

Like other rock stars before him, Jay Breeze has been relegated to "the dustbin of history." Consigned there even before his car hit a tree, Jay's reality was fan-dictated: the embodiment of a past that "the future thought it was." His literary executor, Charlie Beagle, journalism professor, Rolling Stone contributing editor, and former bandmate, retrieves the scraps-what seems the detritus of his friend's life-and composes the ballad of Jay Breeze, Rock Star. Bridging audience and artist, persona and man, musician and muse, reader and unflinchingly rendered character, Beagle arranges Jay's woeful, passionate lyrics into a haunting, heartbreaking song.

Completeness of the Soul

Booth, Jim

Michael Nye's debut short story collection presents nine stories about people who find themselves at turning points in their lives-times of disruption and dislocation, yet also of reclamation and reinvention. These diverse characters include a war veteran turned radio broadcaster, a film projectionist, a former governor of Ohio, a second-generation comic book store owner, and a vascular surgeon at one of Boston's premier hospitals. Startling and precise in its evocations of the lives of memorable characters, Strategies Against Extinction is rich with energetic observation, attentive empathy, and a compelling spirit of uncertainty.

Strategies Against Extinction

Michael Nye

Here are long shadows. Cast as inherited notions of what it means to be a man, Kevin Grauke s Shadows of Men is a defining meditation on maleness, masculinity, and manhood. The fathers, sons, husbands, and lovers of this ambitious first collection occupy a suburban terrain where insecurity, uncertainty, and inadequacy all project a disquieting shade. Their floundering may demarcate the thirteen stories humor and poignancy, but a dignified, near-elegiac portrayal of the modern man resonates. The shadows reach is long, and these characters may stumble and lose their way, but Grauke s empathetic clarity sweeps the unsettling land.

Shadows of Men

Kevin Grauke

Damage suffuses The Sin Eater and Other Stories. From within Elizabeth Frankie Rollins' construct of the blighted home an adulterous husband calls on the services of a stranger to expunge his guilt, a young couple is diagnosed with the bubonic plague, and a bored woman finds herself growing a tail. Yet these others don't dwell; instead, they frame themselves in a way that is sound in structure and sentiment and plunges them from metaphor into modern-day marvel. In the evocative stories of this debut collection, even the tightest crevices dazzle with restorative possibility.

The Sin Eater and Other Stories

Rollins, Elizabeth Frankie

Contemporary

Fiction. A paranoid eccentric fixates on the idea that his apartment's furnishings are being rearranged in his absence, and tries hard to communicate this in the shop where he has a post-office box and where he is, by the manager, loathed. An aging Midwesterner invests in the possibility that the charismatic accompanist who worked with his music teacher years earlier, when he was a child, was in fact a country-western star who'd briefly gone missing after the war. IS THAT YOU, JOHN WAYNE?—Scott Garson's debut full-length collection of short fictions—establishes, in its tightest sentence spaces and sweeping narrative scenes, an interface of identity and expression and compulsion and delusion that is nothing short of singular."The way I feel about this book is the way one of Scott Garson's original, unsparing characters feels about the moon: 'She thought it was beautiful but thought this was beside the point. She thought it was real. It was wild and actual. It was pulling her out to sea.' These wild, actual stories, whether spun over years and pages or distilled into a few words, conjure humor, loss, and moments of startling wisdom. They are beautiful, but also real, and Garson's command of the strangeness in even everyday moments pulls us outside of our everyday lives."—Caitlin Horrocks"This was exactly the book I needed to read right now. I'm not sure how Scott Garson manages the precision of his narratives, the way he uncovers the exact moment, however inconsequential it may seem at first, when the world takes on a new shape for his characters. That he can temper this with a strange, sneaky humor makes IS THAT YOU, JOHN WAYNE? a very special collection."—Kevin Wilson

Is That You, John Wayne?

Garson, Scott

Fiction. The characters of THE DECLINE OF PIGEONS chart a similar course, yet in their isolation they are singular creatures. Facing loss, these lonely people journey away from places they no longer belong and to places they aren't sure to recognize. Yet in a landscape irrevocably altered by disappointment, Janice Deal has laid markers—flag-draped bay windows, diseased phlox plants, and half-filled baby pools—to guide them. A repo man tries to reclaim his own goodness. A married twenty-something amputee tests new bounds. Rivalrous sisters confront their father's death. These characters, flawed yet hopeful, exhibit the bravery that profound loss demands; even as they make choices that might damn then, they are magnificent in their potential to break free.

The Decline of Pigeons

Deal, Janice

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