On "Your Response Should Be in the Form of a Question" by Alex Luft (3818 words) *****

Here's a story that is fairly up front about what it is: a story. Or not. It also claims that it won't do a lot of things that a story does, which lends credence to the idea that it's not really a story. It's a story about a story. It's enough of a metafiction piece to get under a reader's nerves and certainly to keep readers distant from the characters themselves in what would usually be a daunting situation (a couple working on a baby, the husband having just lost on Jeopardy!, their only means to pay for the technology needed to make a baby possible). But Luft's piece is as much about the plot itself as it is about the way that we read stories and what we expect or don't, and in that comes its wonderful twist. Read the story here at the Adirondack Review.

On "Mount Stromboli" by John Matthew Fox (2156 words) ***

The beautiful thing about this story is the way that Fox focuses on the various senses. There are smells, feelings of touch, and sights. This piece is awash with great verbs. We're encased not just in a mundane recounting of events but in a place itself, in the skin of this girl is hiking with her father. The attention to senses makes sense, for the girl's father is a painter, and she too is studying artwork. But there's a worry, the girl has, that so much study will ruin art for her. Her father, she notes, has an understanding of what goes into art, but she senses that he no longer feels art, no longer takes wonder in it. While the girl's sense of wonder may be intact, the father's understanding of technique is what ultimately proves to be salvation--a salvation that leads to some beautiful (wonderful) last lines. Read the story here at the Adirondack Review.

On "Unhappy Women I Have Loved" by Paul Takeuchi (4411 words) *****

Takeuchi makes the ensemble story look easy. Indeed, breaking stories into discreet bits and giving us each morsel is a common technique. After all, in film, we have one scene followed by another and then by another. Writing has to come in these small portions. But midway through Takeuchi's story, I realized he was doing something slightly different, something a bit more difficult. This is, in the end, a story told mostly as summary--summaries of various relationships. There are some scenes, but mostly there are just very well-told overviews, abstractions about the kind of person each woman the narrator dated was. And they are fascinating--perhaps, in part, because they're all depressed. But there's also just so much love here, so my enthusiasm, so much wordplay. I was reminded of Nabokov. And I wanted more, but alas our narrator stops at three--or four or five--women. Read the story here at the Adirondack Review.

On "The Big Hoo-Ha" by Maren Michel (6519 words) ****

Maren Michel's story carried me through to its wallop of an ending. Here is a tale of people aged together so much so that they understand one another's odd grievances and don't much care--or at least Bill doesn't seem to care. Certainly, one gets the feeling that his wife is a bit bossy and a whole lot neurotic, but there's a charm here that Bill sees as few others probably do. Given his chance for freedom, he looks back like Lot's wife. Read the story here at Adirondack Review.

On "Cruise" by Aimee Zaring (5013 words) ****

This story revolves around a secret--a real one, one no one knows but you the reader, and of course the main character of the tale. To be let into such a world is compelling, but it's also difficult. I'm reminded of times when I've been told secrets, pieces of information I wasn't to pass on. I don't like secrets. I don't like, sitting later with other people I know and being asked a direct question about a situation and not being able to answer wholly. If it's a secret, I really don't want to know it. "Cruise," I think, goes into a lot about my feelings why. Our main character has done something in the past she doesn't want anyone to know about, and now she's deadset on keeping it unknown, even at a cost to her sense of self. Read the story here at the Adirondack Review.

On "The Average Human Heart" by Martin Law (2777 words) ****

I wish I could remember the seven stories--or themes--that one writer once said were all that actually exist. Every story we tell revolves around these, he said. I'd be prone to agree with him. When you get down to it, there are only so many subjects we cover. So a good story isn't about telling us something we've never heard but in the telling itself.

Law's story is one about grief, as familiar subject as there can be in fiction. And while it's not a story that's going to surprise you in terms of plot, it is one that will affect you. He does this one sentence at a time, one fact at a time. Our narrator has grown adept at counting, at mathematical and statistical information, and one senses in this his only means of dealing with loss. As the list of facts grow, however, our compassion for him can't help but grow as well. Statistics have never had more heart. Read the story here at the Adirondack Review.

On "L.A. Doll" by Gregory Hahn (3070 words) ****

This story does a great job of playing with techniques that put it very much in line with the setting--Los Angeles. It features a "montage," after all, one that works fairly well. Sure, the story goes for many of the L.A. cliches--the superficiality, the concern with celebrity--but I think that's the point. The narrator has moved to Los Angeles to be a part of this scene. Read the story here.