On "Covered in Soot" by Lynnet Ngulube (1005 words) ****

What can I say? This piece starts slowly enough, but it manages to shock--twice. The first shock involves an act of violation, random, quick, disgusting, like the male streaker that ran through a class of teen-age girls when I was in high school but more personal, more hurtful. The second is even more powerful. Here, a teen-age girl goes with her father and sisters to meet her grandmother at the train station. She's a teen-ager; she doesn't want to be there, and like many a teen-ager, she's sullen and moody. And she pays. Read the story here at Our Stories.

On "Pigs on the Levee" by Thomas Lisenbee (6361 words) ***

Lisenbee manages to tell a story from three points of view--never an easy task--by using the third person here. Essentially, the story of three men attempting to save a levee, this piece is full of action that is likely to make readers want to read on. Think short farming action film. Are there such things? Well, if there were, this would be in the running for adaptation. Read the story here at Our Stories.

On "Tales of Carlos" by Paul Vidich (3415 words) ***

Taxis are a great place for stories, yet taxis usually seem to fall within larger stories (I think even of the sitcom Taxi, which only rarely actually involved story lines within the taxi--most occurred in the dispatch office, as I recall). Perhaps it's because taxis are generally the means of a journey from one place to another, and so the story inevitably uses the taxi as a transition. Vidich's story starts in a taxi and almost sticks to it, though in the end, he too takes us someplace else, someplace the taxi ultimately takes us. But it's an interesting ride, that's for sure, and the narrator himself seems to know this. Danger lurks--and a desire for something more, something different, something out of the ordinary. The narrator gets what he wants--almost. Read the story here at Our Stories.

On "The Unreliable Memoirist" by Keith Lord (4705 words) ****

A few years ago, there was quite a rage over A Million Little Pieces, the James Frey memoir that proved to be in part made-up. But what memoir isn't? I remember reading a guide to memoir writing in a class that I took in autobiographical writing of early America. That book explicitly told writers to embellish, to add details that they couldn't possibly remember. But perhaps there are levels of embellishment that are allowed and levels that are not. Perhaps you can add what clothes you were wearing on the day you saw the Space Shuttle explode but cannot decide that you were a heroin addict instead of only an occasional heroin user. Where does one draw the line? And what are the consequences of drawing the line in the wrong place?

This is what Keith Lord's story is in part about. It's also about a not entirely sympathetic protagonist who becomes less sympathetic the more that we learn about his memoir and its inaccuracies. But it's art, isn't it? Just like a movie is an adaptation that changes facts, a book changes facts as well. How do you tell a good story if you don't at least set it up well? Lord does quite a job setting it up here, at Our Stories.