Lily Hoang, The Evolutionary Revolution

Micro chapters that can stand alone or be read in a linear fashion, Lily Hoang’s The Evolutionary Revolution is a book of sly stepping stones, stepping away from the world as it is now. The world as it is now is assumed by many to be out of our hands, something unstable, something that both affects us yet is not within our reach to fix or improve at moments of strife or general concern. Hoang’s chapters have grandiose names such as “The Imperial Council,” “Man Emerging” and “How the Sea Became Salty,” for the times beg for at least grounded, surefooted beginnings—even if many find themselves wading in obscurity after a story unfolds. More »

Published on juli 6, 2010.
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Amina Cain, I Go To Some Hollow

These fifteen brief stories press the modern reader to examine both their direct and indirect relationship with the external world, through a number of subtle and at other times provocative devices. Amina Cain writes in “Black Wings,” “It is hot and humid and we are reading Lolita. After we read for a while we take a bike ride, and when we are tired we get off our bikes and sit against a concrete wall.” At first glance, this appears to be an unassuming reference to just another book of the past, yet for those who have read Nabokov, we know its literary weight and are sure to be stirred, if not strangely aroused by this juxtaposition of Lolita to the bicycle—the one tool every blooming adolescent recognizes as synonymous with liberation, movement and exploration. More »

Published on maj 1, 2009.
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Alison Carter, A Fixed, Formal Arrangement

It’s not hard to appreciate A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, for this segmented, creative work doesn’t pretend to be anything that it’s not; it hopes that you aren’t pretending to be anything less than yourself when reading it. It’s best to be frank with one another, you and this text, if you want to get to the meat of it, if you want to be more comfortable with solitudes, strangeness, unfinished dialogues, eye holes into panoramas of the beautiful and unfinished life, found among the confused and questioning, found among what comes natural if even unconventional. More »

Published on december 1, 2008.
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Axel Thormählen, A Happy Man and Other Stories

One of many to-be-desired releases in Les Figues’ TrenchArt: Parapet Series (among others such as I Go to Some Hollow by Amina Cain and God’s Livestock Policy by Stan Apps), this special compilation of nine well-crafted short stories by German author Axel Thormählen exceeds any careful reader’s expectations—they are gems to be marveled. Though these stories are similar in tone and in literary design, the subject matter in which they investigate, explode or agitate is such that any receptive soul must harbor the ability to linger appropriately with each one, and a safe haven is needed for the reader to engage in Thormählen’s highly subjective, poetic fiction. Thormählen does not avoid uncomfortable subjects, and because of this, his fiction is—at times—philosophically cumbersome. His stories do not shy away from our mutually shared experiences, and they display internal worlds of his characters with a selective eye—keen in observation, precise in both their secular and otherworldly guises. More »

Published on november 1, 2008.
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