On "Pique Assiette" by Ann Hillesland (3024 words) ***

Hillesland's story grips with sad little moments. A sister visits her grandmother and sister. The latter is taking care of the grandmother--but not in an entirely appropriate manner, or so the narrator things, until she has to spend an afternoon with the grandmother herself. "Do whatever you want," the care-taking sister says, "like you always do," in response to an offer to help. One hears the resentment in a single line, and it stings. Read the story here at Stirring.

On "Paul" by Daniel Davis (3740 words) ***

There's a kind of cold scariness to this tale that starts out as a sort of existential mystery. Chris--or is it Chris?--is sitting in a bar when a man comes up and starts talking to him as if he is Paul, an old acquaintance the man hasn't seen in a year. Usually, when people tell another that they are not who the person is looking for, that's the end of the conversation. We bow out, apologizing, a bit sad, a bit confused, a bit embarrassed. Not here. The man insists that Chris is Paul. And so goes the story to its rather ambiguous and frightful close. Read the story here at Stirring.

On "Breakdown" by Joshua Citrak (2643 words) ***

The way I read Citrak's story is that it's one of those subtle ones that end just as the story is beginning. What I mean is we get the setup for the real trouble that's brewing to happen after the story ends. In "Breakdown" just about everything that could go wrong on a road trip does--because a vehicle seems absolutely unwilling to cooperate. But there's also something naive about the stories' characters that Citrak exploits, as if they are a vehicle that's never had troubles before that is about to crash. Read the story here at Stirring.

On "Cheap" by James Armstrong (1122 words) ***

How much are we worth? To our family, we are worth everything, if it comes to a health-care expense. How dare an insurance company tell us no more? We sell our house and our car, spend out our retirement, anything, to keep this person alive. Or . . .

We get scared. We avoid the family all together. Let's nip this in the bud. Let's do things on the cheap.

This story mines that border between friendship and intimacy. Up front, we pay twenty dollars for an evening, put the person on layover. And then, either we never come back or we cash out our bank balance. Read it here at Stirring.

On "Extinction" by B. J. Hollars (2385 words) ***

If the Hollars story featured earlier on this blog (here) was fantastic realism, this one falls more precisely into the realism camp. That earlier story, with its odd subject matter, caught my attention much more quickly, but this story still managed to keep me reading.

"Extinction" is, in part, a story about stereotypes. They aren't the stereotypes we usually think of, when looking at a national or human level--racial, gender, or otherwise. These stereotypes are more personal than that. These are stereotypes that two characters have built up about each other--a dad who fails to acknowledge that his son has grown up, and a son who can't see his father for the new man he is. This is also a story about change, two men dealing with grief, one the loss of a mother, the other the loss of a wife. And most important, this a story about desperation, about a dad trying to hang on--to life, to people, to anyone really, but most especially to his son. Stirring doesn't publish fiction very often, it seems, so the stories are rather special when they do. Read the piece here at Stirring.

On "Taking You Fast" by Ann K. Ryles (4716 words) ***

I have yet to find a bad story in Stirring. But then again, Stirring so rarely publishes fiction that I get the feeling it's extremely selective. Here's a piece that is very finely written, full of the things one so often sees in fiction--adultery and child abuse. In Ryles's hands, however, they don't come off as pat. They come off as engaging. Part of this has to do with the second person. I have friends who simply reject any story written in the second person. I think this a big mistake. Granted, perhaps I'm a bit too prone to like stories in the second person. Blame that on all the Choose Your Own Adventure novels I read as a kid. But take this story and put it in the first person. It would seem to work fine (I'd say no worse or better than it does in the second person)--until the ending. Part of what's going on here is that "you" are in the present, remembering all these moments leading to this moment at the end. The first person, at the end, in the present tense, I would argue, would seem entirely contrived. You couldn't tell this story this way--you couldn't use the present tense. You couldn't leave us at the start of a trip into the unknown. You'd already be there, telling this story. You'd know. Read the story here.

On "China Mobile" by Summer Block (3381 words) ****

Stories in exotic locales or involving exotic characters have long enchanted, almost always in part because of the exoticism itself. Good stories, however, do more than just show off the exoticness. Sometimes they manage to convey a sense of place and time and character that makes one think for a moment, "Yes, I too was there," even though of course you weren't. This is one of those. "China Mobile" does this in part by running down a description of a list of friends, friends like Chloe, who "was more than just pretty, but . . . was also pretty." A few sentences on each, a few comments on drinking and getting along, and one gets a sense of this narrator's world. It is a small place, just one little microcosm in something so much larger, so much larger that it is beyond words. We can't know China, but we can know this one little piece of it--a piece of it that is at base still American. One of the things I admired so much about Jay McInerney's novel Ransom, on first read many years ago, was the way it was able to conjure up a world similar to this, a world of American exiles at "home" in some strange, weird place. Block manages something similar here, but without the excesses of plot that made Ransom seem far fetched. Read the story here at Stirring.