On "In Thirty Minutes or It’s Free" by John Minichillo (1479 words) ***

Something about the mundanity of delivering pizza appeals to me in a story. As I recall, it was the subject of Tao Lin's first novel, and here it is again as a focus of Minichillo's wonderful short story. Cliff and Wendy are watching a movie, but the pizza they've ordered is late. They're a little irritated. Calls to the chain restaurant keep eliciting an "It's coming" response. But something wicked is working that neither Cliff nor Wendy know about, and it'll change just what this pizza means to them. Read the story here at Frigg.

On "The Man with the Nose in His Living Room" by Zin Kenter (643 words) ****

Kenter's work has a strange, dreamlike quality. In one of her other stories, wings drawn on a page take to life and fly away, for example. In this story, three destitute people hear that a bakery they enjoyed as children has closed, and so they head off to steal the bakery's emblem, a giant nose. Kenter brings in much material that seems unrelated to the subject at hand, and at first I felt like, um, what's all this other stuff doing in here. But I think that by the end she pulls it off. Why? Because this story isn't just about the nose but about the old adage about how smell is our most powerful sense when it comes to eliciting memories. And indeed, the end of this story is a doozy, bringing us back a memory that showcases just how sad these people's lives are, sad in a way that is absurd at the same time. Read the story here at Frigg.

On "Victorious" by Claudia Smith (655 words) ***

A child's point of view makes for a disparity in stories that is often engaging--and likely why writing from a youth's perspective is so popular. Basically, you have a built-in means of showing only the surface but hinting at something much greater--you know, of following old Hemingway's trick of only showing the tip of the iceberg. Children are so innocent they often don't realize the real trouble lurking below all those superficial gestures. The problem, though, is that most adults, by the time they're writing such stories, know what's beneath the surface, so reclaiming that childhood perspective can be tough. Smith does a great job here, telling the story of a family of wanderers, parents whose hopes have been dashed repeatedly and children who still think the world is big and beautiful and full of possibility. Read the story here at Frigg.