Animal Rights and Pornography: Stories

Animal Rights and Pornography: Stories J. Eric Miller Stark, haunting and immaculately brief, J. Eric Miller’s groundbreaking first collection resonates with minimalist restraint and lush, sensual depravity. A tale of incest as bland and grand as a creation myth sits alongside the story of a man accepting his own rape as he watches a stripper gyrate obliviously behind glass. From a character’s obsession with...

Animals

Animals A Novel Don Le Pan It is more than one hundred years in the future and the horrors of factory farming combined with the widespread abuse of antibiotics have led to mass extinctions. The majority of all mammals, birds, and fish that humans have eaten for millennia no longer exist. Add to that an ever-widening gap between rich and poor and an over-taxed healthcare system. Those not fully capable—the...

Awake!

Awake! A Reader for the Sleepless edited by Steven Lee Beeber Fiction (including previously unpublished stories by Aimee Bender and Arthur Bradford); essays (from Yale neurobiologists to Priscilla Becker) and the probably true fictions (like Jonathan Ames’s masturbation solution to insomnia); comics (Howard Cruse, Shannon Wheeler); poetry (Charles Simic, Rebecca Wolff)…even Davy Rothbart of Found...

Bummer

Bummer And Other Stories Janice Shapiro The women featured in these stories have one thing in common: They’re having a terrible day.There’s the housewife so entranced by the pristine order of her neighbors’ belongings that she can’t stop herself from breaking into their homes. There’s the mother easing her young son through the trauma of a murder, suddenly confronted with the reappearance of his father....

Deliver Me From Nowhere

Deliver Me From Nowhere Tennessee Jones From the portrait of a man laid off from an auto plant–who fantasizes about eating the car he helped build–to the chilling first person account of a killing spree, the stories in Deliver Me From Nowhere illuminate the changing forces behind American discontent. Set against the expansive emptiness of the American landscape, Deliver Me From Nowhere presents a...

Drenched

Drenched Stories of Love and Other Deliriums Marissa Matarazzo Two lovers accidentally create a love potion while making a batch of Jell-O. An apartment is filled with water as an act of gravity-defying devotion to an acrobat. At turns blissful, absurd, sexy, and devastating, Marisa Matarazzo’s stories don’t just push the boundaries of love, they show how very boundless it is. These interconnected shorts...

Hotel Theory

Hotel Theory Wayne Koestenbaum Hotel Theory is actually two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of hotels, and a dime-novel (Hotel Women), featuring Lana Turner and Liberace.  The two books, fiction and nonfiction, run concurrently, in twin columns.   The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author’s dreams, in...

Kissing Dead Girls

Kissing Dead Girls Daphne Gottleib Kissing Dead Girls is a kisstorical romangling that investigates myth, history, gender and states of being. Beginning with the province of legend, Kissing Dead Girls uses poetic inappropriacies to touch historical paragons and examine what touches us in them in vignettes casting the narrator as the lover of Josephine Baker, Amelia Earhart, Anne Frank, Frida Kahlo, Jonbenet Ramsey,...

Love in Infant Monkeys

Love in Infant Monkeys Stories Lydia Millet Lions, rabbits, monkeys, pheasants—all have shared the spotlight and tabloid headlines with famous men and women. Sharon Stone’s husband’s run-in with a Komodo dragon, Thomas Edison’s filming of an elephant’s electrocution and David Hasselhoff’s dogwalker all find a home in Love in Infant Monkeys. At the rare intersections of wilderness and celebrity, Lydia...

Superworse

Superworse The Novel A Remix of Superbad: Stories and Pieces Ben Greenman, Edited by Laurence Onge The original McSweeney’s Superbad comprised more than two dozen pieces in various genres from serious fiction to post-modern satire to lyric. As Susan Minot put it, Greenman’s mind may contain “a Russian short story writer, a slap-stick gag writer, an art critic, a literary critic, a cultural commentator, a...

The Great Frustration

The Great Frustration Stories Seth Fried Channeling Steven Millhauser by way of George Saunders, The Great Frustration is a sparkling debut, equal parts fable and wry satire. Seth Fried balances the dark—a town besieged, a yearly massacre, the harem of a pathological king—with moments of sweet optimism—researchers unexpectedly inspired by discovery, the triumph of a doomed monkey, the big implications found in...

The Withdrawal Method

The Withdrawal Method Pasha Malla Pasha Malla knows joy in all of its weird, unsettling, and wondrous forms. In their humor, careful warmth, and straight honesty, his stories capture clearly something odd and beautiful -the unmistakable feeling of empathy. From young couples fighting through the emotional trauma of the modern world to children navigating wayward, forbidden paths of fantasized adulthood, Malla...