On "The River" by Christine Sneed (6372 words) ***

Unfortunately the long-term unemployed are all too familiar these days. Sneed's tale is about one of them, a man who decides to take up his time preparing for a lawsuit to crack down on pollution. Meanwhile, his marriage is falling apart. And his daughter, whose point of view this story comes from, just wants things to stay as they are, but her efforts seem only to create more trouble. An interesting sidelight is the daughter's boyfriend, who has gone off to college, and like the parents in this story, the girl and her boyfriend no longer talk. In a sense, then, the story is about breakdowns of communication--for the daughter, the communication breakdown is in a passive, nonconfrontational manner that we see echo throughout all her interactions. Read the story here at TriQuarterly.

On "The Cardboard Dress" by Ian Bassingthwaighte (3971 words) ****

I have an anthology on modernism in literature that I inherited from a retiring professor many years ago. One of the things I like about that anthology is that it splits modernist writing into three camps: realism, impressionism, and expressionism. In a way, all such labels are simply means of categorizing that have little bearing on the writing itself, but in another way, they're interesting ways to think about the way in which one writes or reads a work. Right now, I'm feeling like I've just finished a marvelous work of impressionism.

The narrator here struggles with his point of view from moment to moment. Does he hate his wife or love her? Does he hate these friends they have or love them? Oh, and does he really want to experiment with group sex or is he only interested in gauging his wife's reaction to the proposition? And what reaction is he expecting? Like many persons whose motivations and feelings regarding dubious encounters change from moment to moment, so too does this narrators. Read the story here at TriQuarterly.

On "Free Lunch at the Poseidon" by Erin Gnidziejko-Smith (5195 words) ****

This gem reminds me a bit of the Coen Brothers film *Raising Arizona.* Perhaps, it's the babies. Perhaps, it's the relative stupidity of these characters. Perhaps, it's their trashy lives. Perhaps, it's all three. Although I generally love the Coen Brothers, one of the things I dislike about many of their films are that their characters often are relatively stupid--and that contempt for their characters often seems to come out in the film. Gnidziejko-Smith manages, however, to make us care about this guy and his girlfriend, who are on vacation and, through faults all their own, down on their luck. Stealing has never been so dangerous. Read the story here at TriQuarterly.