by prfire | Oct 17, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
You find yourself in the forest. You know the one. It’s the forest where the stories you read as a child take place. A forest so green and thick, that it’s positively brimming with life, with magic. Up ahead, you see a grand building, majestic amongst the trees, yet...
by prfire | Oct 5, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
The flyer for Kimmy Beach’s beautifully produced novella Nuala advertises a dystopian future troubled with love, possessiveness, and envy—it lives up to the pitch. But its subtitle, A Fable, points to more. The fable leaves the book open and inscrutable while...
by prfire | Sep 24, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
Hannah Godfrey is a formidable storyteller, so much so that even a thoroughly academic dissection of the vagus nerve becomes emotive prose in her chapbook Not For The World Would I Compare It To Anything. The ambitious collection of short stories and essays was...
by prfire | Sep 14, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction
As I read Natalie Appleton’s memoir, I Have Something to Tell You, I was reminded of a time in my life spent wandering toward a certain something I could not define, but that I believed was out there waiting to be found. In I Have Something to Tell You, Appleton...
by prfire | Sep 4, 2018 | Book Reviews, Fiction
In Bill Gaston’s short story “Hello:,” the narrator tells us that, according to some Tibetan Buddhist teachings, guardian spirits called Protectors exist, whose “sole purpose is to promote our wakefulness” and like to do so by “giving us a slap.” This original, vivid,...
by prfire | Aug 17, 2018 | Book Reviews, Fiction
The Heavy Bear is Tim Bowling’s latest novel and like In the Suicide’s Library (2004) its focus is on the ghosts of great male artists. Where In the Suicide’s Library meanders around the lives of Wallace Stevens and Weldon Keese, The Heavy Bear tracks the ghosts of...
