On "Teeny" by Nelly Reifler (2643 words) *****

"Teeny" focuses on a girl who is charged with taking care of the vacationing neighbors' cats--but who for some reason shies away from actually doing it, even as the cats begin to waste away. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "When the Rains Came" by Jonathan Papernick (412 words) ***

Papernick's short piece gave me a short Job moment, wherein I wondered, Why does disaster strike? Here, townspeople wonder exactly that, exactly what they've done wrong in God's sight to cause such a thing. Is there always such a direct corollary? Well, maybe, as the absurdist turn of events suggests. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Mouth" by David Ryan (3139 words) ****

Ryan's "Mouth" hits on past, present, and future in a way that I haven't quite seen before. The story begins with a wedding of sorts, one brother visiting the other. And then, quickly, it becomes a story about an accident, the way that one comes upon such emergencies in real life, without warning. And it becomes about bodies and mouths and shame and hope and desire and dreams and fear. Read the tale here at Failbetter.

On "Choose Your Own Adventure" by Matt Ferner (1868 words) ***

Here's a tale based on the familiar kids' series of books (although I guess there have been a few adult versions, though they never much caught on). In a way, the series itself seems somewhat antiquated now, since the idea for such a thing has been replaced by hypertext and that in turn by realistic video games that let you "live" the action rather than read it and decide from a limited set of possibilities. Still, what makes Ferner's piece unique is that this is CYOA written by a "literary" writer, meaning that the endings are generally nihilistic, epiphanic, or utterly inconsequential, mostly the latter. In other words, the story ends, but like most literary fiction, the ending is kind of open and suggestive--and in a way, not completely satisfying. Make your own choices here at Failbetter.

On "What Do We Have in Our Pockets?" by Etgar Keret (521 words) ***

Not sure this counts as a story. It's more a thought piece, a question posed and answered. The rising arc in this case is one not of conflict, climax, and resolution but of mystery posed and mystery answered. But it's a form that can work just as well for flash or even for many a work of fiction. Keret here asks us to meditate on the contents of his pocket, on why he carries so much about. Alas, I carry most of these things myself, but not for the same reason, and unfortunately, in my forty-plus years, I've never had the kind of opportunity Keret's narrator dreams of having. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "The Banker and the Poet" by Matthew Sharpe (9427 words) ****

Sharpe's tale is a story of contrasts--heart and head, art and money, poverty and wealth. I'm reminded a bit of other buddy stories, opposites who stick together, like the friends in Sideways or the brothers in Adaptation or True West. Rick works in investment. He has a girlfriend and can have virtually any gal he wants. He lives well. He's a winner. Alec is a poet. He sometimes gets the gal but more often doesn't. He lives poorly. He, we might say, is the loser, at least when playing against Rick. And yet, they are friends, with conversations about philosophy that would put most others' conversations somewhere on the level of kindergarten swing-set dares. One other thing: Alec is about to fall in love, with a transsexual prostitute. He is about to ruin his life, what there is of it, and Rick is about to find out just how much he too can love. Read the story here are Failbetter.

On "For the First Time, Again" by Meghan Austin (682 words) ***

Just yesterday I read an article in which the author claimed that a college degree was a waste of time. There was some debate on this issue in the comments. What, after all, is college for? One venture capitalist has put forth a prize for people who drop out of college and do something significant--by this I mean start a company and make a certain amount of money.

The claim, so it goes, is that college will never pay off. Given the price of a tuition at many college, that may in fact be true for some students, despite the fact that college graduates do earn substantially more throughout their lives than non-college graduates. Does the extra few thousand dollars each year really pay off, when a debt of one hundred grand has been racked up?

But is college about how much money one is going to make? Is it about one's job opportunities? Or is it about something else, about--dare one say--education, education for life, education in values, education in critical thinking?

Enter into this fray Meghan Austin, whose story is about college education, only here the college education is one in which what is learned is not from the books that are taught in class but from the experiences one gleans while in the class, a class that is, on the face of it, a waste of time. I kept wanting to think the story about a grand psychology experiment. Take the teacher away, and see what the students accomplish, what they end up thinking. But maybe what the glean is deeper than that.

I remember being excited by the learning I got to do as an undergrad. By graduate school, I remember being more jaded. I loved the research that one did as a grad student, but the class time itself no longer seemed as important. What, after all, was there left to be taught except simply platitudes (modernism stemming from the loss of a center; romantics being more individualist than classicists; our ideas are all bound within a cultural framework from which we can't escape) that I had long ago put to memory. Perhaps Austin's class is discovering these sort of things early. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Three or So Uses of the Crab Apple" by Caren Beilin (1198 words) ****

Beilin's story is like a poem, a set of refrains that repeat with different meanings. It's a structure I have flirted with often in my own writing and rarely ended up using. But I love refrains. I love them because of the way they add levels to our language while reminding us of things past (things perhaps just pages past). And that's what Beilin does here--she reminds us. Memory becomes a weapon here, preventing the conclusion of a story, preventing romance, but creating both as well. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "He Tells Her a Story" by James Fleming (4000 words) ****

So Fleming borrows a style from Stephen Dixon, whose work is often fascinating but also often grating. He likes to go off on digressions, but not in the sense that one might go off in digressions of thought but rather digressions of dialogue. Dixon's Interstate is one of the more successful works of this nature.

Here, Fleming does something that I have tried to do--and failed at doing. He tells a story about the struggle with telling a story. In Fleming's hands, this is actually a fun and humorous piece. One story starts, but it's not good enough or the listener has already heard it or the listener doesn't want that kind of story, and there's this constant back and forth about what a story really is and how one manages to to tell one. In a sense, we're watching a story get written as we're listening to this story. So there's a story within a story about telling a story, only is that story within a story really a story? That's open to question. What is a story? Read the story here at Failbetter. (A word of caution in case this isn't your kind of thing: this story contains a lot of talk about sex.)

On "God's Lost in the Suburbs" by Kristin Kearns (4777 words) ***

In Kearns's world insignificance and significance switch places, much the way that the word dog is a palindrome for God. Bruce and Maggie have just moved to the suburbs, along with their dog, who has now gone missing. But these aren't just any suburbs. This is a gated community, where everything is ordered, where rules keep it looking pristine, and where strangers need not bother visiting. What have we lost in our communities when we shelter ourselves off this way? What have we lost in our world when we fail to call out to a greatness beyond? Our attempts to shelter ourselves off, Kearns seems to imply, leave us in longing. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Matters of Breeding" by Douglas Light (1500 words) *****

Let's talk about crime. Let's talk about crime in fiction. Most of the time, crime is the focus. After all, crime is interesting. It's illegal. People get in trouble. There are high stakes. But that's what we expect. All of that is present in Light's "Matters of Breeding," but the bigger focus here is a marriage that is falling apart--oh, and the narrator's intense interest in trivia. It's the trivia, the banal, impersonal trivia, that makes this narrator seem like such a real and personal. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Pittsburgh" by Meghan Austin (1331 words) ***

What is love? This is one of the issues that Meghan Austin grapples with in Pittsburgh, the story of napper who lives with another napper, a dreamer of dreams that mirror those of the lover. People are crabby. People are upset. People are not very nice. But you love them. Maybe they love you. Maybe. Depends . . . on . . . what . . . they . . . do. Maybe. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Break Up" by Douglas Light (1842 words) *****

Susan Minot's story "Lust" consists of a list of a series of incidents and men (much like Kidder's "Beds," discussed here on this blog). It's a technique that is deceptively difficult to pull off. I think the reason is that it's hard to formulate a plot in this manner, and in the end, no matter how interesting the list is, we as readers want it to add up to something.

Light's "Break Up" is another such story--a piece about all the women that this narrator has broken up with. Or, as we read longer, who have broken up with him. What makes "Break Up" work, I think, is that there is an agenda. This guy is talking to someone, trying to make something work out this time. We care. We're interested. We want to know if he will succeed. Something tells me not.

Credit the newly founded Pugilist Press, which is reprinting Light's novels, with bringing this author to my attention. I think I'll be reading more of his stuff. Read this story here at Failbetter.

On "If Poems Were Children" by Margaret Sullivan, "Unfinished Letter to Death" by Connie Voisine, and "A Conversation about Momentum" by Cami Park

Sullivan's very short poem is a simple metaphor carried to its logical conclusion, and as such, it is gorgeous. I've sometimes wished for less of a desire to write if only to have more time for other things in life. And yet, the opposite--the inability to write, EVER--is probably a more discouraging prospect. Read the poem here at Failbetter.

Voisine's piece falls into the "unfinished" category of writing, but what makes it so ingenious, coy, original, and darkly funny is that it does not just remain unfinished in one piece. It is a collection of unfinished phrases, begging to to be filled in, just as a life cut short often is. Read the poem here at Pool Poetry.

Park's short poem discusses exactly what the title says--all the ways in which most things move toward another thing, whether we wish it to or not. The interesting part here is in what Park chooses to discuss. Read it here at Ward Six.

On "All-American" by Jenn Stroud Rossmann (1865 words) ****

This is the first story about a rape that I've read from the point of view of someone other than the victim or the perpetrator (though one film I've seen presented points of view from both the victim and the victim's boyfriend). That distance helps make this story the strong piece that it is, the way that it takes the stereotypical "strong American man" and puts him in a situation that is demands vulnerability and helplessness. The story is further aided by its second-person narration. Try putting it in first person, and it would sound silly. Put it in third person, and the distance seems even greater. "You" catches just the right amount of identification in the reader. You can read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Stranger Things Have Happened" by Alix Ohlin (7100 words) ****

Here's a story by a true professional, each work intact and shining. I fell in love with it from the first sentence and came to like it more with each paragraph. There's a certain predictability in much of the trajectory (you know, the whole coming to life again, discovering one's true self and one's true love), but then again not (some things don't end up quite they way one would expect). Take a woman who is miserable, and give her the opportunity to change all that. Her husband, as it turns out, is miserable too, and surprised to find out they both are bored with one another, together they hatch plans for a divorce. Preparation for the divorce itself becomes something wonderful and exciting. And then, something happens that upsets everything and sends the story in a whole new direction. It's worth finding out what that direction is, here, at Failbetter.

On "Doors Closing" by Amy Anderson (2751 words) ****

Snoopers. How many have you been the victim of? How many have you victimized? Why do we have such curiosity about others who we know or live with? Is it a secret crush? A desire to be like someone else? Or is it a wish to be with a given person? Do you wonder where you fit in someone else's life? Do you imagine yourself in his or her thoughts? What are those thoughts? Maybe it's best you don't know. Maybe it's best you just keep imagining. Maybe it's best you don't even meet. These are all the things Anderson's story delves into, with its lump of inevitable sorrow in the end, a sadness I feel like I've shared a few times myself. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "The Rattle" by Al Dixon (465 words) ****

A writing teacher of mine once noted that it is often the absence of knowing something that gives a story its power. Tell us what is in that bag everyone wants--or wants to get rid--and a story might just lose some of its bang, its malice, its sense of impending dread. Movies, especially thrillers and horror movies, are often built around this. I think of The Blair Witch Trial, for instance, which gained most of its thrills by failing to show viewers much of anything. Sometimes a few screams in the dark are worth more than all the blood and gore a director can throw at someone. And sometimes, a rattle that makes a man cry years later hints at something we probably are happier not knowing about. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Mexico" by Andrew Roe (2518 words) ***

This is one of those stories that works largely because the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It starts off promising enough, but by the time I reached the central incident, I was wondering why the story didn't just start there. And then, the language began to fall apart--extra words, dialogue lines that seemed to go on too long, and overwriting that seemed to rob the scene of much of its power. But hold on for those last three paragraphs--the author will whack you with some slam-bang lines that will leave you almost breathless. The story all comes together then. It's not easy to write endings like this. And like many such endings, it slips up on you in a way that all that seeming excess early on can not only be forgiven but seems, actually, necessary for the ending to have such power. Read the story here.

On "Enough Said" by Amy Havel (600 words) *****

I love this short little piece, published recently in Failbetter, one of the best online journals I've come across. And I love Amy Havel--or at least her work. She's written pieces published in the Adirondack Review, Pindledyboz, and a number of other journals. But this is by far my favorite, the way she's able to work around a single phrase, to redefine, and to tell of an entire relationship that way. Reminds me a little of Rick Moody's "The Boys." Read Havel's story here.