On "Second Non-place" by Stephen Hastings-King (221 words) ****

I'm not sure quite what to make of this short piece, but I like the writing. Hastings-King splits characters from story here and places them somewhere new--and new and new and new. Read the story here at 52-250.

On "Dinner" by Amelia Gray (576 words) ****

In Amelia Gray's bizarre world, someone isn't served just soup with a hair in it but in fact a full plate of hair. This sets up the embarrassing situation of not knowing what to do with it. Is this some kind of delicacy? How does one eat it? What's more, the issue is that this is a date. I love how this story gets at all the awkwardness that goes along with first dates, first days on the job, and other firsts, where we're striving to make the right impression and find ourselves warring within over what we want and what we want, who we are and who we want to show that we are. Read the story here at Shelf Life Magazine.

On "Amelia Gray's Museum of the Weird" by Amelia Gray ***

I've greatly enjoyed Gray's stories on the Web, as evidenced by the number that I've featured here on the blog. They have a kind of zaniness that makes them incredibly fun to read. At their best, they also manage to comment in a disturbing way on our contemporary world. Stories like "Babies," wherein a woman wakes to find she's birthed a new baby each day, are funny and yet horrifying, a combination that first made me a big fan of Jeffrey Eugenides Virgin Suicides back in the day. So it was with great earnestness that I finally turned to a full collection of hers.

The collection of mostly very short stories reads very quickly. Many of these pieces have been featured online. And many of these pieces read like the tales one would find online. What I mean is that many aren't really tales. They're interesting forays into the absurd, playful things you'd find on sites like McSweeney's Internet Tendencies. And while such makes for fun reading, the collection as a whole for me became weighted a bit too much toward the weird. After a while, I wanted more things to add up.

The best stories in the collection seem to be those freighted toward the start of the collection. Or perhaps, the best stories are those I read when I hadn't become inured to the weirdness. "Babies" is a great lead-in. Another good one, "Unsolved Mystery," surprisingly wasn't published independently before the collection's publication. It involves a detective on the hunt for a serial killer, and the detective's relationship problems and his faith in God. Gray nails the closing on this one and manages to make all these spinning plates relate to one another and work off of one another to say something about spirituality and knowledge.

In the "entertaining but not really a story" category would be such pieces as "Trip Advisory" offering advice on visiting Reagon's boyhood home, and "Code of Operation," a set of rules for a Snake Farm run by an obviously deranged owner.

On "The Meaning of The Hat" by Anne Leigh Parrish (993 words) ***

One comment on a story covered on this blog quite some time ago agonized over the fact that I hadn't revealed the "meaning" of the story (I assume this was a student wanting clarity for some class paper or project). The problem for me would have been that establishing a "meaning" for the story wasn't my aim, nor was it something I felt like I could establish, outside of historical or literary context, nor was it something I really wanted to do. A great story--or work of art--often doesn't have an easily defined meaning; it's mysterious and so is the power that it holds over us. I could, perhaps, provide a list of themes or motifs that work through the piece, but a single "moral"--no.

Parrish's little piece is about that same sort of function in art criticism. Having been trained in how to read a book through college literature courses, the ability to do so now seems much easier and natural than it was when I was younger. And yet, I never got so far with art criticism that I have background enough to be able to say X is so-and-so's postmodernist response to W's modernist concepts of space, etc. I look at a piece of art and think, that's an interesting picture. Maybe, if it moves me, I might try to investigate the picture more deeply. And that's essentially what happens in Parrish's story. A woman brings home a set of paintings and wonders about what they are about. Seems simple, but what Parrish seems to suggest is the the painting is really about the viewer. Our interpretation is necessarily colored by who we ourselves are. A hat is not just a hat. It's what we long for, whatever that uniquely is. Read the story here at Knee-jerk.

On "[Spoiler Alert]" by Laura Eve Engel and Adam Peterson ***

Winner of the Collagist Chapbook Contest, this work, for me, has more in common with prose poetry than with short fiction. Each one-page "tale" is titled "[Spoiler Alert]," and many of the short pieces focus on endings, giving "everything" away.

As tales, the pieces weren't terribly compelling to me, but as collections of brilliantly honed and polished sentences, this--like many a poetry collection--as a grand work. Indeed, sometimes sentences are enough, as seems to be the case in some poetry reviews I've seen, where the reviewer gushes about individual lines (yes, but what does it all mean? and how does it work on me personally, emotionally and intellectually?).

So let me rehearse some great lines. The opener is a kicker, about how "everything is people." Indeed, as the authors prove, everything is. I also particularly liked the second to last piece, about a set of murderers simultaneously taking blame and denying it. The piece on shopping malls is a good one too--"To be lucky," we learn (and have to nod after thinking about it), "means to sleep beside a person so well-suited to yourself that on Valentine's Day you each produce the same bauble purchased the same President's Day Sale at a mall." Lovely thoughts and words.

On "Three or So Uses of the Crab Apple" by Caren Beilin (1198 words) ****

Beilin's story is like a poem, a set of refrains that repeat with different meanings. It's a structure I have flirted with often in my own writing and rarely ended up using. But I love refrains. I love them because of the way they add levels to our language while reminding us of things past (things perhaps just pages past). And that's what Beilin does here--she reminds us. Memory becomes a weapon here, preventing the conclusion of a story, preventing romance, but creating both as well. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "The Last Storyteller" by Frank Delaney ****

Delaney's Last Storyteller is an ambitious novel that seeks to connect history, myth, and personal reality, all in the guise of a tale--or series of tales--about recently independent Ireland of the 1950s.

The main storyline focuses on Ben MacCarthy, a government employee whose job is to collect folklore from around the country. The setting is an Ireland being torn apart by violence--the fight over the freeing of Northern Ireland from British control supported by a group of rebels that would become known as the Irish Republican Army and the desire to appease the British supported by an Irish government happy enough to have at least three-quarters of the island out from under the English Commonwealth.

Or is that the story and the time? For in fact, The Last Storyteller includes many stories within it. First there are the various subplots. Ben is obsessed with his wife, Venetia, who left him for an abusive American scoundrel. Meanwhile, his story-gathering career brings him into contact with Jimmy Bermingham, a tough guy and sometime crook who gets Ben involved with the IRA against his will. Extricating himself from the situation becomes a major part of the action of the novel, but the contacts prove useful later in possibly the novel's key event, one that brings Ben to question his life and his moral grounding.

And then, there's John Jacob O'Neill, the traditional storyteller, whose stories and presence lends comfort to Ben--but whose stories also prove to have something of the aura of both history and prophecy about them. They teach, they entertain, and they foretell. And in fact, several of O'Neill's tales appear in the novel's very pages. And it is in this manner that Ben's personal journey becomes something of history and something of myth (for, Delaney seems to be saying, we are all living history, which in turn is bound one day to become legend). History teaches, and it does so largely because we are doomed to repeat it--and as a result, it also tells the future. Each tale in the collection then becomes a message to Ben, about what he should do and/or what he will do.

A storyteller is something quite different from a novelist. The novelist works on the written page, but a storyteller works in front of an audience. Hence, the O'Neill's stories have the feel of Old World fantasy, even as they often involve true elements from Ireland's far-off past. If you like fairy tales, legends, or myths, then these are surely tales you'll enjoy, well told and and full of masterful turns of phrase. (Among the most easily remembered tales for me is  a story O'Neill tells about a king in a land where it always rains.)

Delaney's project has extended beyond the novel, however. Taken with the tales of the storyteller, he has decided to write out various other pieces of Irish lore (and pieces inspired by such writing) in the spirit of O'Neill and to make them available as e-books on his website. They also include introductions that explain the history behind the creation of each tale. Curious readers can find the e-books here.

On "Interoffice Romance" by Dan Pinkerton (934 words) ***

Pinkerton's romance is a study in group thought, one person upping the next but everyone sort of doing the same thing. It captures, as a few recent works have, the kind of camaraderie that exists in office cultures--and the lack of camaraderie (secretly, of course). As such, it's a humorous piece, all about Valentine's Day, the awkward holiday that those who take such things seriously get depressed over--or spends lots of money on. Read the story here at Hobart.

On "God's Man" by Lynd Ward ****

The Library of America's release of Lynd Ward's six graphic novels caused me to pick this one up just because I was curious and because what I saw of Ward's work--all woodcuts--was remarkable (a few samples can be found here). God's Man is the first of Ward's picture books (there are no words), and it is a simplistic and moralistic tale. Still, without words, it takes a little extra attention to know exactly what's going on. I think of it as a different kind of reading, akin to reading stream of consciousness--you're not being told everything that happens. You have to intuit from the pictures what the plot is.

But Ward makes it easy enough to do in this tale. The main character is an artist who essentially sells his soul in order to gain success. Along the way he meets a woman who turns out only to be after money. When things go badly, he escapes to life alone in the mountains and finds a good wife, has a child, and then pays for his early folly when the soul comes to be collected.

I won't go into great detail more. That's already been done and better by others. If you want to know more, for example, there's a great article in Slate on the topic, which you can find here.

On "A World of Flirts" by John Brandon (3495 words) ***

Brandon's character Joyce is a little bit kooky, and that is what makes her so interesting. She's a woman with money to waste, and she wants to waste it--I mean, really wants to waste it. Such seems a bit ridiculous, and yet, the deeper one gets into the story the more we see how her reckless behavior is covering up for something called loneliness, something called grief, and that behavior is enough to get her through, to keep her living.

What I really like about this piece is its dialogue. The kookiness helps to make it interesting, and the kookiness is--as the title suggests--a means of flirting with all around her. Now flirting is an interesting sport. It's an entertainment of sorts, and it's something we can use to gather people to us--or to keep them away. And Joyce seems to be of that ilk, a person who simultaneous wants deeper connections and wants to keep connections from getting deeper lest she get hurt. Nevertheless, one ends up liking her, at least in print. Read the story here at Joyland.

On "When I Was a Fish" by xTx (317 words) ****

Want a lawyer to take care of you after a death in the family? xTx describes one way to go about it. The story here is a leap of the imagination, twice over. It's the imagined answer to an unanswered message, and as we get deeper into the possibilities, the imagined becomes more real than the real. The story transitions from one to another, even in the tenses used--from present to imagined future and back to present (in that imagined future). And what of the music of language here--teeth barricading a tongue. Fantastic stuff here at Ramshackle Review.

On "Emote Control" by Anne Swan (2243 words) ***

Swan's story is a kind of sales pitch. In fact, it seems more like a sales pitch than a story, and yet the story creeps in slowly underneath. It's a piece about control--control of our lives, control of our surroundings. In this world of ever-increasing services, of online spying that allows people to know more about us than we even realize about ourselves, the "Emote Control" device the narrator is offering allows us to be completely pleased at the end of our time on earth. What it doesn't offer is the ability to redeem a past wherein we failed to make a difference to someone close to us that we lost. Technology, Swan hints, is only as good as its user. Read the story here at Joyland.

On "A Craigslist Ad for a Mind-blowing Self-Actualization Party" by Margaret Wappler (467 words) ***

Sometimes I miss California, even in all its wonkiness. Sure, we have a share of that here where I live as well, but somehow it seems different in the desert sun. Wappler's ad (I'm not sure one could call it a story) has all the makings of an event I would never attend. But it's an event I would hear about, from acquaintances, these people I work with, this person I sit next to on the train, this party I drop in on with a friend for five minutes. You can read the ad here at Joyland.

On "Building the Dream" by Gwendolyn Wright ***

This text is a history of the American home starting with the simple and plain residences of the Puritans back in colonial times. Although the work is a social history, Wright focuses most of her attention on the architecture and its meaning for people. The book is short on anecdote, making this a good summary but at times surprisingly dull for a work issued by a commercial publishing house.

Each chapters focuses on a unique type of home as it comes into being in the United States, be it the slave quarters, the country cottage, the tenement house, or the apartment.

It was when Wright hit the tenement house that my interest began to pique up a bit, for it is here that I first began to see the beginnings of our current housing situation. And my personal interest grew especially prominent once I hit the period in which government began to take a very active role in American housing, largely during the Depression.

The tenement house was a building created to house many a tenant and that often housed many more than it was supposed to. It's where the poor came to live when then immigrated to the city. I think of such homes as apartment, and yet, in Wright's book, the apartment is actually the tenements diametric opposite. The apartment was for the rich who wanted to live in the city. Although a rich person would have to give up the space allowed in a larger country home, the apartment offered a slew of amenities not available anywhere else: running water, bathroom facilities, and kitchen facilities (the latter usually in the form of a communal kitchen and dining hall). They were more like live-in hotels than today's apartments.

Government begins to take a role in the housing of the population with the coming of the Great Depression (and continued during the 1950s, when returning GIs led to a shortage of housing). The same arguments that continue to our time were present even then. Give needy people too nice a home, and you're interfering with the private sector and making people lazy. Hence, some policymakers attempted to make homes sponsored by the government into places no one would want to live for long. At the same time, some, trying to take advantage of the system, actually did build places that your average nonpoor person would have been jealous of. Where's the balance?

Construction firms and other well to dos began to game the system and got legislation passed that allowed them to build the new housing rather than the government outright. Government money transitioned from building homes for the poor to rebuilding rundown areas of town. Often, only a small portion of these "rundown" areas was actually blighted, but business interests could get the area condemned anyway and build newer, fancier places for the residents. Only, of course, they were the same residents. Lower-class (but not necessarily poor) people who might have had a decent home but were near a blighted area might now find themselves on condemned property and unable to buy a place in the newly refurbished neighborhood.

Also discussed are "community standards" for homes in suburban areas (the way that so many homes look the same or that in-home businesses are banned). And finally, there is a section on the contemporary housing problem. By contemporary, however, I mean the problem of around 1980, when Wright wrote her book.

And that in itself was very interesting. In 1980, of course, the interest rates would have been skyrocketing, as well as home prices, and the average home would have become more and more something an average American couldn't afford. In fact, as the author notes, most "turnover" (at this time at least) is among a very small segment of the population. People aren't buying homes for the first time; rather, the same people (about 15 percent of the population buy 90 percent of the homes) are selling one home and trading up to a new one (or, as it turns out, "down" to an old one in a gentrifying area).

Wright proposes various solutions to the housing problem, where rents and purchase prices are both increasing at an alarming pace. Of course, in 2012, we know what happened. Interest rates came down, and new forms of low-income loans came into being, right about this same time or just a few years before Wright penned her history. Such would lead to further price increases but also to a larger segment of the American population owning a home and being able to afford it--until, of course, the bubble burst, and we get what we have today: a time when homes no longer accrue value as they once did and where many a poor owner has been unable (or unwilling) to pay back the enormous debt, in turn damaging our banks and our financial industry and by extension our everyday businesses.

If there's one lesson that Wright's history poses for us, it's that there's no shortage of greed in the system, going back all the way to the early history of our housing.

On "The Inheritor" by Ann Gelder (4701 words) ****

Gelder's "Inheritor" intrigues from word 1. It's the second person again, and the feeling of conspiracy that Gelder provides for us--we're going to play along with her for a while, participate in this what if scenario. And the scenario? Well, that's intriguing too. What if you're a B-level celebrity and some other B-level celebrity whose recent claim to fame is that he's been able to predict celebrity deaths predicts yours? Yeah, it's a bit of a crazy notion, but how would one react if there's a statistical analysis saying said prognosticator is always right? Time to prep for the end of life? Time to find out just how it's going to happen? Time to laugh off such schenanigans? Or time to get ready for career recovery, since you're now famous enough to have your death predicted? I think the last might be the wisest option. But let's say that's not what you do . . . Read the story here at Slush Pile.

On "Date with Purpose" by Tracy Montgomery ****

This practical guide doesn't focus so much on dating per se but on preparing to date well. Many of the points should be common sense: keeping yourself clean, dressing well (but not being a slave to faddish and expensive fashion), maintaining a budget. Montgomery is proclaiming that good dating has to start with yourself.

For that reason, her earliest chapter focuses on getting to know yourself. She suggests you take a trip to a place you've never been by yourself. There, observe other couples, get to know the locals. In other words, find yourself, and once you know yourself, you'll be better able to find another to complement yourself. Not necessarily bad advice, though this suggests that we have an essential self, which can be problematic. Our self is what we do and who we are--I don't know if we have to go looking for it or that, once looking for it, we can even find it.

The sections on dating, to me, seemed to be based around largely common sense. She doesn't offer any magic here. Find things you like to do and share them with others. That's how you can find who to date. If your activity doesn't lead to lots of repeated contact where a predating relationship can be forged, then you'll have to resort to "devious" means and get a phone number or something of that sort, and get to know the person that way. In getting to know a person we will also hopefully build attraction. She's not a believer in the various gurus who try to claim attraction is all in playing games.

Rather, real attraction--lasting attraction--rests in our character. Personality itself rests in character. If we forge strong character, then we will attract people and keep them, more than someone who forges a superficial personality but who can't keep up the show over a long period.

I like that she focuses on what seems most real in people. She makes the whole process of dating seem much less scary and much easier than it's ever seemed to me.

On "Ex" by Glen Pourciau (703 words) ***

Pourciau's finely observed "Ex" revolves around a dating couple who can't get over their respective former spouses. I say "finely observed" because the description of the restaurant that serves as the setting for this date is marvelous. You get the feeling of a place that's packed, that's not intimate in the least (the people have to shout at one another at the tables). And that lack of intimacy works nicely with the hurt that each character feels and the way in which neither character wants to open up. Read the story here at Corium.

On "Big Angel" by Julie Innis (3836 words) ***

Innis's "Big Angel" tauters between worlds--Russian, Latin American, and American. It is a tale of cultures coming up against one another, a tale of genders coming up against one another, and a tale of families coming up against one another. What binds hold us together? What binds tear us apart? The world Innis focuses on is a restaurant, where two brothers provide for other immigrants each day. One brother is attractive, the other is married. Enter the waitresses. Enter the problems. Read the story here at Blip.

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 "Flight" by Katherine D. Stutzman (2629 words) ***

Imagine if the Weekly World News' Bat Boy were real (oh, but he is, some probably are saying). Or imagine that instead of the Garcia Marquez's man with enormous wings landing in a town that cared little for him, that man grew up in the town. These are essentially the premises of Stutzman's story. A young girl grows wings. The town reacts. What, one may ask, is that reaction? Being different--so different--means that the girl is lonely, and this is what the story becomes, a mediation on that loneliness, on that desire to find someone who can appreciate her and the consequences when no one does. You can find it here at the Summerset Review.