On "Three Chords and the Truth" by Richard Fulco (5551 words) ****

Here's a story about rock and roll, about adolescence, about being cool--or trying to--about picking up girls, about friendship, about parents and their expectations. Years ago, a friend of mine wrote a series of short stories about young girls, ages twelve to eighteen. The stories were intended for the young adult market, and by and large, they were really fantastic--of course, I don't think any of them ever saw publication unfortunately (that's a book of stories I'd have purchased).

Fulco's story reminds me a bit of my friend's stories. Here, all the parents are conspiring against their kids, conspiring, however, in the best sense. They just want to see their kids be successful. For Greg, that means playing football--not rock. For the narrator, that means studying algebra--not music.

But music is what inspires the narrator and why he has to conspire to practice it, play it, listen to it. It's also what brings people together who otherwise wouldn't be. It's a way to discover not just yourself but others. Meanwhile, the narrator is wrestling with girls just as many young men do, and his best friend, to whom girls come easy, is wrestling with a parental problems of a more sinister sort.

The title here lends to an ongoing motif throughout the story. The truth is compromised in order to play music--through lie after lie--but it's also what, down deep, one might say the narrator feels when he's focused on rock and roll. Read the story here at Front Porch.

On "Martian Time-Slip" by Philip K. Dick ****

The last and only time I read a Philip K. Dick novel was while I was an undergraduate in college, taking a class in film adaptation. I had not much enjoyed the movie Blade Runner, the basis for which was Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But as I watched the movie over and over and over for a class paper, I began to gain a certain appreciation for it (especially for the director's cut, since the narration is, to me, overbearing). The novel struck me as even more profound and direct in terms of its themes but at the same very much a pulp book: the writing didn't seem to me terribly sophisticated or strong.

Having just completed reading a biography of the man, I feel like virtually all of the elements of this most recent book I've read could be filtered through the things that that biographer--a former wife--had to say about it. I saw in the Mars setting certain preoccupations Californians have with landscape--namely, the need for water, and the way in which water comes from the mountains. Also, there's the preoccupation with real estate speculation, another common California motif. In fact, I'm not recalling exactly, but this might have been one of the novels the biographer mentioned as having been written straight, and then, failing to sell it, Dick simply reset the novel on Mars and sold it as sci-fi. That would make sense, except that the book veers more and more heavily into the fantastic as the plot progresses, such that Mars seems integral to the plot by the novel's end. Still, Dick himself did feel like, with this novel and Man in the High Castle, he had finally found a way to merge his desire to be literary writer with the fact that the only thing people wanted to publish or read of his was science fiction.

Indeed, if anything, this book is extremely focused not on questions of man in the universe per se but on psychological questions. Reading someone's ideas, from the 1960s, of what life on Mars would be like, it was kind of funny to see him referencing tape recorders and the like constantly, a technology that has pretty much gone away (I'm reminded of a really cool animation short that was nominated for an Academy Award a few years ago--it was sci-fi drawn as if Victorians were conceiving it, with space ships looking like huge wooden vessels). So too, the psychological themes stem to ideas that were in vogue at the time--Dick had a huge interest in Jung's work, as well as the work of existential psychologists'. And so we get vast sections--in fact, the heart of the novel--revolving schizophrenia and autism and the idea that these are related and might be related to a person's ability to live within time.

Sure, the book is about time travel, but interestingly, that travel takes place completely within the heads of the various characters, within schizophrenic seizures and dreams. In this way, the characters' can learn of the future, but they can't do anything to change the future (by going back to the past). What's there is already fated to happen, and that fate is death. The most we can do in light of this, it seems, is ignore such and struggle on.

The plot itself revolves around a scheme to develop a portion of the FDR Mountains on Mars. A human settlement has been planted on the planet, but the lack of water has kept the place from thriving. Developers, however, have word that the best prospect for water is in those mountains, and so the native Martians (yes, Mars has natives, who like so many other natives in history are thought to be essentially primitive and are pushed aside by "humans," even though it seems clear that Martians are actually of the same stock), the native Martians are pushed out. Meanwhile, hearing of this scheme, one local immigrant named Arnie Kotts sets out to find out where the best place to develop is so that he can beat the Earth UN developers to the spot and sell out the undeveloped land for huge prices; unbeknownst to him, some Earth-side investors have the same idea. And the race is on to find someone who can tell Arnie the future.

On "Sectioned" by Katrina Gray (593 words) ***

This brief story recounts a birth. What I like about it so much is its attention to language. I'm reminded a bit of a piece I've been reworking for a journal of late. I couldn't help but be a little jealous. What I do in about 1500 words, Gray manages in just over 500. There's joy here. There's pain. And it all seeps out in the words. Waiting for us to listen. To join in. Read the story here at Necessary Fiction.

On "Babes" by Natalia Cortes Chaffin (3818 words) ***

Here's an adventure story--and a political tale. I'm reminded of the five-year-old boy who came to America on a boat during the Bush administration. The relatives refused to send him back to Cuba, where his dad lived. The dad insisted the boy be sent home. Chaffin's story empathizes more with the political feelings and assumptions of the relatives rather than the father, but it still holds one's attention. How to save a child? Not once but over and over? Read the story here at the Coachella Review.

On "Beyond Lies the Wub" by Philip K. Dick (2672 words) ***

This short tale of Dick's still manages to be more than the sum of its parts. Some animal rights activists might take heart in its major plot point--what to do when needing food and all you have left to eat is each other or a sentient pig? This pig has other talents too, however, which may not have been counted on. What makes it okay to eat another creature? What makes something human or not? In what way does humanity bear responsibility for what's around it? These are the questions Dick addresses here. (Note: I'll be reading various works about and by Philip K. Dick over the coming months, so expect more stories and reviews on the subject, along with the usual links to great online stories.)

On "Search for Philip K. Dick" by Anne R. Dick ***

This biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick by his third wife (of five) is in some ways rather untraditional. It is, after all, a biography by an ex-lover. And in many ways, it is a kind of personal mystery story, which is why it is set up the way that it is.

By set-up, what I mean is that the book is not in strictly chronological order. We don't start at Phil's childhood but rather at his meeting Anne. His adult life starts there, and the rest of the book covers his life until his death. And then--then--Anne returns to Phil's childhood and covers his life until the moment he meets Anne. This strategy lends the tale a kind of poignancy one might find in a movie--and a kind of shift in sympathies. What I refer to in sympathies is that one feels most of Anne--until the end--when now we see Anne's entry into Phil's life from another perspective, that of his previous wife, Kleo. Now, instead of a love story, it's a tale of betrayal. Anne, the devoted wife who rescues Phil, is now the other woman who steals him.

This isn't to say that I felt sympathy for Anne all along. It's always a bit hard to feel sympathy for the adulterer, but Phil--at least in his reckoning--wasn't happy; Kleo didn't want to have children (though later we learn it was Phil who didn't want them--alas, just excuses for leaving). Beyond that, Anne has some emotional intensity I can't sympathize with; she and her new husband have fights in which she throws dishes--rather scary to me.

But as time progresses, she mellows, and it is Phil who becomes increasingly detached and disturbing. And Phil is disturbing--abusive, depressive, dependent, and drug addicted. The dependence on drugs began early. The child of divorced parents, in high school, Philip becomes progressively more uncomfortable with his surroundings and eventually drops out. This discomfort intensifies as he begins his career as a writer in early adulthood, such that he is diagnosed with agoraphobia among other things and issued prescriptions, which would prove to be a bane throughout his life.

It is during his life with Anne that he becomes increasingly paranoid and dependent on these drugs--and on Anne. But he also becomes abusive and, to put it bluntly, crazy. At some point, he gets his wife put into an insane asylum. A constant liar, he's able to convince others she's trying to kill him. This, obviously, lends to further problems in the marriage.

Eventually, he leaves Anne. And in this is the mystery that Anne tries to solve. She was, despite all his troubles, greatly in love with the man--and hoped and wished for him to return ever after. She was willing to put up with his insanity. Why, why did he leave? she asks, and that is what she sets to find out. In the process, she learns that she didn't really know him--and can't.

Despite Anne's constancy, he moves onto other women and other parts of California. He also moves on to more drugs--lots of them--and eventually ends up in rehab, so that at the end of his life, he is much less dependent on them than in the middle portion of his life. Meanwhile, his writing finds its audience, and his books begin selling enough copies such that, always poor early on, he's now rolling in doe. And as such, he becomes an incredibly generous man, though also a crazy one, as all-consumingly dependent on those around him as at any other point in life. Most women, eventually, can't handle it and move on--or he moves on from them to another. This inability to keep a stable family angered him throughout life.

Also he was bothered by the fact that people were only interested in his science fiction. He was interested in ideas, the state of man, and as such thought of himself as a literary author, but the literary books didn't sell--at least until he was a very well-established name late in life. So he had to write literature through his science fiction.

But the science fiction, as fiction by most authors, revolves around some rather consistent themes and motifs--the same stories told time and again. And with many of them based in people and events he actually knew.

The book ends with Anne's dreams about Philip. These alone are fascinating, but they are especially so when written out by a wife who is completing a biography of the man.

On "156 Miles to Las Vegas" by Isaac James Baker (864 words) ***

Baker's "story" is really a meditation on a moment from multiple points of view. Start with lovers, go to the person who has to watch them, proceed to someone for whom the lovers are just friends in the background. What is this moment, 156 miles out of LV? It's a time to relish, a time to escape. Originally published in Clapboard House, read it here.

On "Hanger" by Kat Lewin (1619 words) ***

Lewin's story seems like something out of a vampire novel. It's a regular night, and a woman asks him to help her kids but . . . This is horror movie stuff but delivered in a way that on some odd level seems possible, save for the weird imagery, which is itself part of the horror. I reminded of an incident a few years ago at a local grocery store in which a woman was walking around with a knife stabbing things; the security guard tried to stop her and was seriously slashed. Do I understand that woman? No. Nor do I understand the woman in this story. But we're not asked to understand. We asked to watch, and then run. Read it here at DeComp.

On "Something More Interesting" by Tara Laskowski (2435 words) ****

Heidi is out to make some changes in her life. What is interesting to me about this is that we get to see her make those changes. She's suffered a breakup with a boyfriend, who has offered her various reasons. It seems we'd more likely, in a story, get the things leading up to the breakup. Or we'd get a story about someone coming to terms with the breakup. Instead, Laskowski sets up her character with a self-improvement regimen, of sorts. Heidi's life is changing, but what that means we don't really know. Read the story here at Corium.

On "Cursed" by Adolfo Caceres Romero, translated by Kathy S. Leonard (735 words) ***

One of the three or four short stories that Edgar Allan Poe wrote over and over--for Poe, as I learned when reading a whole stack of his work, was rather redundant in his themes and plots--was that of the person waking after having been buried. Poe thought of this as the ultimate scary story, the nightmare, to wake and find oneself in the grave. Indeed, the concept is scary, though--I don't believe--not so common as Poe makes out. Romero's tale works this theme to full effect. What happens when the dead rise but no one believes it? Read the story here at Cerise Press.

On "When the Evening Reaches Here" by Jessica Harwell (3599 words) ****

This one is a brutal story about alcohol, about alcoholics, about love, of a sort--or inertia. What is it that keeps us in relationships gone bad, even when other opportunities arise? Is it a concern for the other person? Is it the safety of what we know? Is it that we can't break away from memories of better times, that splitting might suggest such times weren't real? Is it that what we want is not always what is good for us? This is one sad piece, one that hints at a life that isn't going to change anytime soon for the better. In a sense, Harwell's story is mystifying in that regard, how it keeps one satiated, even as it proffers no elements of transformation--and few prospect. Read the story for yourself here at Identity Theory.

On "The Way of Zen" by Alan Watts ****

Alan Watts remains one of my favorite writers on the subject of Eastern religions. This book is one of the basics, going into the history of Zen and then some of its practices. I first read it back in graduate school while working on my thesis, and over the course of the past year, I have been rereading it. Having read it in such small chunks, however, I didn't get as much out of it as perhaps I did in the past. But then, Watts's writing is often best meditated on in small chunks--it isn't always easy to follow as a whole (though it is not difficult reading).

Although this may be a basic text, my favorite of his that I've read is probably still Psychotherapy East and West. There, Watts compares Western and Eastern thinking most clearly to me, as he discusses how principles of psychology are in some ways related to Eastern thought (and in some ways not). It's a text I think I will return to soon if I decide to reread more Watts.

On "His Virginia Mammy" by Charles W. Chesnutt (6821 words) ***

In this tale from Reconstruction days, a white man falls in love with a pretty woman who doesn't know her ancestry. Like Moses, she's been pulled from a river and raised by adopted parents, these, Germans with a particular status that, though lost, doesn't make the white man fret. In fact, nothing does--or would--he's so in love with the gal. But the girl is concerned that her real parentage might not come from decent stalk, and so she refuses to marry, until one day she meets an old black woman who is able to tell her all about her wonderful parents and the ship on which the daughter was rescued from. What's rather heartbreaking about this story is the willed ignorance that all three of these major protagonists allow to stand in for truth. A mother knows her daughter is better off not as a daughter. A suitor and his love know this too. And so do we. While one may blanch at the idea of living a lie, it's hard not to see it as the best situation in an unjust world. Read the story here.

On "He Tells Her a Story" by James Fleming (4000 words) ****

So Fleming borrows a style from Stephen Dixon, whose work is often fascinating but also often grating. He likes to go off on digressions, but not in the sense that one might go off in digressions of thought but rather digressions of dialogue. Dixon's Interstate is one of the more successful works of this nature.

Here, Fleming does something that I have tried to do--and failed at doing. He tells a story about the struggle with telling a story. In Fleming's hands, this is actually a fun and humorous piece. One story starts, but it's not good enough or the listener has already heard it or the listener doesn't want that kind of story, and there's this constant back and forth about what a story really is and how one manages to to tell one. In a sense, we're watching a story get written as we're listening to this story. So there's a story within a story about telling a story, only is that story within a story really a story? That's open to question. What is a story? Read the story here at Failbetter. (A word of caution in case this isn't your kind of thing: this story contains a lot of talk about sex.)

On "Don't Mess" by Jeff Kass (3798 words) ***

There is something that makes me a little queasy about Bull--the online magazine, that is. Bull is a magazine of fiction for men. The writing, I find, intriguing. I guess it's full of testosterone, or something, whatever men push out on a page that's inside them. What makes me queasy is the idea that I feel like I'm not man enough to write anything like these stories. Most of the men's fiction seems focused on, um, well, women. And that's natural, no? Most of the guys are tough ones--maybe that's where I get a bit squeamish. But I guess I have no real reason to be, since my own work has appeared on its pages.

In this story by Jeff Kass, the Bull's tough guy is a wrestler, one that can defeat just about anyone he comes across. Or so he says. Problem: Somewhere along the line someone thought it a good idea to introduce cheerleaders into wrestling, and now our men are fighting it out not just to be top dog but to be top dog for the ladies. In a magazine of men's fiction, which seems focused so often on women, it's fair to predict that wrestlers' actions are likely to remain the same. Read the story here at Bull.

On "Shoes for Rent" by Lynne Potts (2273 words) ***

Here's a strange story with a narrator who is almost there. We'll learn more about the narrator by the end of the story, but the narrator remains elusive in many ways. Things don't quite add up. And neither do we know or learn the whole story that the narrator tells, though it seems more complete than even the narrator's own. Unique here is the voice, which seems to go from one strange random detail to another, as if the story were haphazard rather then plotted--but that's just part of the various deceptions. Read the story here at Guernica.

On "Undressing Bullie" by Scott Lininger (492 words) ***

This little piece works off the element of surprise. Take a newspaper ad and watch what happens when things don't quite go as planned. No wonder folks are suspect of the "Internet" when it comes to love. Read the story here at the now defunct Battered Suitcase.

On "Clues to Murple" by Kirk Curnutt (6303 words) ****

Where do I begin with this piece about self-indulgence and contemporary culture? Curnutt's tale is so fraught with relevant commentary that it's hard to put what matters into words without just sending you to the story. Murple is a writer who is obsessed with himself, with his fame, with the number of hits he gets on Amazon, on Facebook, on GoodReads, and so on. It's not as if writers have never cared about reviews and reviewers, but in the Web age, the reviews are instant. Merge this obsession with the will to do anything to make a name for yourself, and you get what Curnutt creates in this story. It's also quite funny. On the run from the police, Murple can't help but check his Web presence, even as it provides clues to his whereabouts. Watching him try, for one last time, to get famous shows just how pitiful the guy is. He desperately needs a self-esteem burst. Why don't you help him out by reading the story about him here at the now defunct Flatman Crooked?

On "Quartet in Autumn" by Barbara Pym ****

This book came to me by way of a friend who insisted I read Barbara Pym. "Isn't that a bit too staid, English, and old-fashioned for me?" I asked. You'll love her my friend said. I promised I'd get around to her--as in, years from now. Hours later, he produced a book. "I knew you wouldn't read her unless I made it impossible for you to avoid her," he said, handing me a copy he'd purchased just for me. And that was the book I just finished reading.

Staid, old-fashioned, proper, English? Yes, all of these things could describe this novel by Pym. But also accomplished, in the best sense of the word. The novel tells the tale of four coworkers, all of them single, all of them on the verge of retirement. Their jobs are on the chopping block, but rather than fire them, the company has decided to keep them on until they retire, then get rid of the jobs. In the course of the book, two of the workers do retire, and we watch as these four older people deal with the attendant loneliness. The office, on some level, is most of what they have, and without that, without each other, there's little to fill the days.

The novel itself is told in intervening sections from varying points of view. Letty is a heavy-set woman who never married and whose plans to go live in the country with a friend upon retirement fall apart when the friend decides to marry instead. Marcia, a homeowner, is dealing with a mastectomy. Norman, like Letty, simply rents a room in a house; at lunch, he tours the library or the British Museum. Edwin fills his nights with church activities and the occasional drink. All of them are desperate on some level for companionship, except arguably Edwin, but all of them are unwilling to admit it. And so they dither away their days, wondering really what there will be to do after their jobs end and their days are wholly their own.

But Quartet in Autumn is not in the end a novel of despair. Amid this, Pym finds a way to suggest that the characters find new meaning to their lives, even as those lives hit their near close. What that meaning is, however, she doesn't give much clue to.

On "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" by Ambrose Bierce (3247 words) ***

Ambrose Bierce, storyteller of more than a century ago, dabbled very often in stories about ghosts. Of those not involving soldiers, this is one of the better ones. The plot is a familiar one--recycled in various Bierce stories. It starts with a duel, a bet of sorts--to stay in a haunted house--and ends up a tragic joke. As people regularly faint from surprise in Restoration dramas, so people regularly die of fear in Bierce stories. Read the story here.