On “Sunshine Cleaners” by Daphne Kalotay (5498 words) ***

"Sunshine Cleaners" involves Russian immigrants who work in (but not for) a laundry facility, sewing up old clothes. Sergei wonders when he'll score big, whether he'll meet a woman, whether he'll make some real money. Each day a gal comes in and blames him for not fixing a machine that steals her money--"not my machine," he says. Read the story here at Fifty-Two Stories or listen to it here at the Drum.

On "Probate" by Joyce Carol Oates (12,628 words) ***

As I began this story, I was reminded of how some writers are just so good. Oates is one of those. I don't think this one of her best stories, but from the first word, it somehow managed to set a tone and grip me till the very end. The writing is absolutely assured. In this very strange piece, a widow discovers that the husband who has just died is not who she thought he was--and then, well, the story becomes some weird nightmare scape. Read the tale here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "I’ll Take You There" by David Williams (4284 words) ***

This story gets where it gets on voice. Having lived in north Mississippi for nearly three years, I can feel to an extent the people Williams is writing about. Here, Ivy's mom finds God and tries to get Ivy to find the same type of God too. Not gonna happen. Or will it? Read the story here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "Bar Beach Show" by E. C. Osondu (3375 words) ***

I haven't read too much literature from Africa, but among that which I have read, there is often a kind of simplicity and sadness. The stories are of people struggling to make a living amid poverty and lack of work, of pride and joy in small things. In this tale, a young man defies his father in his desire to become a musician--and ultimately a crook. In a nation where there is little justice, the crook, depending on a person's point of view, may be considered a government critic or simply a barbarian beating up on who he can. Father takes on stand, son another. The results are expectedly tragic. Read the story here at Fifty-Two Stories.

On "On the Weekends Sometimes" by Ben Greenman (2926 words) ****

Professional. That's how I'd describe the writing here. A really great writer can catch you with a first line and pull you on one sentence at a time and make it seem so easy that you're left stunned, not understanding how those ten or twenty or thirty minutes passed so quickly. Greenman's tale is about Boyd, a man in love with the wife of a sort-of friend of his, a man unwilling to take action for the obvious reasons. Instead, he wiles away his days with a pretend girlfriend, all the while he and the wife flirt around the obvious attraction, hoping to avoid what seems inevitable. Read the story here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "The Weightlifters" by Daniel Torday (5700 words) *****

Weightlifting can have many meanings--not just the physical aspect of it but the emotional. In this tale, Torday explores what it means to hold in one's feelings and thoughts about others, the kind of weight that adds to our lives, and the kind of weights that are added when we actually share those views with others. It's one family, the Klonfelders, as in the kids' books, all the love they have for each other and then not so much, the whys and wherefores never explained, like many a good date answered with no return messages, no acceptance or proffers for a second, the person just gone. Read the story here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "The Lakes of Florida" by Charlie Smith (2110 words) ****

It's wonderful to read a writer in utter control of the language, and that's what Smith does here, effortlessly churning out one gem of a phrase after another. The story itself is collage of events. There's a basketball star whose lost his girlfriend and also who has lost his job to drinking. There is a father and son hanging out drinking at a boat house. There is a tall tail about an alligator wrestler. All of them are here, in almost less space than a college paper. Read it here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "The Mission" by Emily Gray Tedrowe (8084 words) ****

Tedrowe's story mines the world of current events. It reminds me a bit of some of the stories I've read while working on anthologies that focus on a special event. Nonfiction has the allure of being true, and in today's media-conscious world, where new journalism is nothing out of the ordinary, fictional pieces describing world events don't seem to me quite as necessary. And yet, they still have their power, that ability to get below the surface and explore how such events affect a person on an individual level. Perhaps one day, there will be story anthologies about the war in Iraq--now already fading in the news--and this well might be one of them. It's a tale of a sister opposed to the war whose brother goes off to fight it, of families torn apart the way the very country was, of contradicting impulses--to support our relatives, our troops, or to hate the work that they are doing. Read the story here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "Alaska" by Tom Franklin (1103 words) ***

Here's is a flight of fancy. It's a tale about about two guys imagining what they'll do one day when they finally work up the guts to abandon all that they have and know. Alaska is a place far away, a place one constantly heads toward--but the aim isn't to arrive at Alaska. The aim is to take off for Alaska and to ponder the wonderful and long experience along the way. The aim is to dream and keep dreaming. Read the story here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "The Cure" by Rahul Mehta (1863 words) ***

Mehta's "The Cure" reminds me a little of Imad Rahman's I Dream of Microwaves. That book, a collection of stories about an aspiring actor, is full zany unbelievable things, and Mehta seems to be doing something similar here. The narrator is a neerdowell from a rich family (a family that got rich through hard years of toil). He has some kind of fixation with burning money and, at the suggestion of friends, chooses to attend therapy to find a cure. The burning of money here is a metaphor made literal. Why use money on such conspicuous consumption? What sort of guilt are we harboring or should we harbor when doing so? What, really, is life about? Read the story here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "Remove Yourself" by Catherine Lacey (1396 words) ***

Some stories require you to warm up to them, while others speak to you from the first lines. This is one of the latter for me. It's a piece about "removal," first a literal and immediate removal, and then a longer-term and deeper removal. We start off with a car, a place where the narrator is being told that she is no longer welcome. But, as she notes, she has nowhere else to go. Our sympathies are with her. What's going to happen to her? And why is this happening to her? And then we learn the answer to the first--and a little to the second--and our sympathies shift a bit. Read the story here at Fifty-Two Stories.

On "The Collected Notes of Gary, 3C, to the Unnamed Tenants of 4C (June 9-Oct 6, 2003)" by Jonny Diamond (1701 words) ***

Not too many years ago a (former) friend of mine (dating back twenty years) decided he no longer wanted to be in contact. Dense as I am, I didn't understand that that was what he was telling me when he said he didn't think we had much in common anymore. True that we had less in common, I surmised, but for me that was not enough reason to stop exchanging messages once every few months or so. And so I continued to write. The messages went nowhere, and on the cusp of the time--a year later--when I was figuring maybe I should no longer bother, the friend finally wrote me back. The message? What was I, a stalker? Wasn't it clear he didn't want to be in contact anymore?

Diamond's story follows a similar tact, though here Gary, from 3C, seems clearly desperate and somewhat insane. Perhaps, he only seems that way because I am the third person here, not the first. Nevertheless, this one-sided collection of messages is a fun and funny read, which you can do here at Fifty-Two Stories.

On "1966" by Janice Shapiro (3941 words) ****

What I love about Shapiro's story is the elaborate description it gives of a time and place. This is Los Angeles in 1966. These are kids, with a summer to obsess over baseball or murder. And this is a summer for a grumpy teenager, who is about to take a step in the open--told from the point of view of children. It's a story about longing and about slowly have one's perspective change. Dad is no longer a hunk; he's simply not bad looking. The babysitter doesn't like you. And on and on. Read the whole bevy of discoveries here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "Aesthetic Discipline" by Carolyn Cooke (3255 words) ****

Here's a story that shows why Cooke is a professional author. Words charm here, and thoughts as well, all essentially to tell us no more than a remembrance or set of them. And yet, I found myself enthralled, hanging on each description. It's as Cooke's narrator herself says, the depth is the surface--in other words, we glide on the words alone, and that is enough. I won't even bother pondering some philosophic deeper purpose. Who needs it? Just enjoy, here, at Fifty-Two Stories.

On "Dependents" by Sean Ennis (3036 words) *****

This isn't a story that zings plot. It's a story that rather sneaks up on a reader, a collection of observations. The situation is rather unextraordinary. New parents go to a party across the street. There, we meet some interesting people, including a man who is AWOL.

I have a story also about AWOL soldiers and patriotic holiday weekends, something based on a real life incident in my early twenties. It's one of my favorites, but now that I've read Ennis's version of such a tale, my own slow-burn of a story seems ridiculously long and unexceptional (its forty-plus-page length is likely one thing that will keep it from ever finding a home in a journal). His piece is one-third the size and full of zingers and observations that punch a person between the eyes (i.e., in the head, in the brain); his piece makes you sit up and pay attention. The narrator realizes that women who have given birth have a swagger men cannot match without surviving some kind of aerial crash. The writing is beautiful. And by the end, you realize that this is a story parents struggling to understand their new child, struggling to stay the course and not go AWOL, struggling to believe they're up for all that is to come, and somehow you realize that this is every parents' story. Read it here at Fifty-Two Stories.

On "The Copy Family" by Blake Butler (2311 words) ****

Here is a story about not just one doppleganger but three. Beyond that, I'm not exactly sure what it's trying to say, but it sure is interesting. I'll take a stab at deeper ideas anyway: The tale starts with one family meeting its copy. Exact in each way, the "real" family pushes the copy family out of its home. Here we have a concern with authenticity. What makes something authentic? And how and why is the authentic preferred to the inauthentic, even when they are exact duplicates of one another? We don't like to consider ourselves just like others in society. We like to think ourselves unique, and so our actions dictate the killing off of our duplicates, setting ourselves off. Except . . . Sometimes duplicates are better--or just as good. Despite ourselves, we settle on our copies, just as our children often grab the lion's heart of love from their parents (spouse for spouse, person for self). Anyway, that's one reading. Maybe you can find another here at Fifty-two Stories. (Word is, Butler has a new novel coming out this spring--I look forward to it.)