On "Now is the Time for Us to Be Sweet" by Molly Tolsky (3698 words) ****

Here's a story that managed to truly surprise me. The writing throughout is clean, the voice assured. I'd read this, I thought. I read stuff like this, and it is good. But I hadn't, because I'd never read a story that managed to do that and add a twist I didn't see coming. Literary story, sure, but quiet, not really. We're left wondering just who is the more affected by this relationship, the victim or the victimizer, and which is which. Read the story here at the Collagist.

On “Sugar Bowl” by Dan Winnipeg (5136 words) ***

Winnipeg's "Sugar Bowl" is a family saga. It revolves around two main motifs--a story that the father tells about a knife, and a sugar bowl that sits in the center of the family's dinner table. We watch as the mom and dad's relationship disintegrates but continues on anyway. We watch as the kids go away to college and adulthood. We watch as the kids overcome various social problems--stuttering, obesity, drugs--and as the parents die. Throughout it all, Winnipeg uses the knife and sugar bowl as foils around which to place these different story elements. These elements unify the story and keep us interested. Read it here at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink.

On "Test of English as a Foreign Language" by Walt Giersbach (2959 words) *****

This is probably one of the most depressing stories I've read in a long while. By depressing, I don't mean something that's cathartic, that somehow manages to give hope. This is a tale that revels in nihilism. And in cultural differences. Shirley Lee is a woman of Chinese descent who lives in the United Sates and who, for want of anything to do, spends Christmas Eve bowling and, by chance, hooking up with a man with military credentials. Much can be said about the American film versus the foreign one, and it is said here, and then it is played out in the fiction itself. Read the tale here at Rose and Thorn.

On "In the Basement" by Stefanie Freele (2014 words) ***

If you want a grueling moment-by-moment account of a bulemic's struggle with one particular meal, than Freele has it for you. I have to admire the way that Freele doesn't hold back here. The information is enough to make the practice seem every bit as gross and disturbing as it is. And on a metaphorical level, the story is about something else a bit beyond just bulimia. It's about the way that we hide our sins, our lives, our selves, from others--hanging out in the basement rather than at a party, keeping our food choices secure from others' sights or our boyfriends from our parents. Read the story here at R.kv.r.y.

On "Where You Lay Your Dreams" by Sterling McKennedy (508 words) ***

McKennedy's flash piece is full of wonderful details that show us the essence of the narrator and the person he's talking to. His comparative "experience" shows in how he feels himself "gracious" to this new divorcee. But what really shines in this piece is how these two divorced people are both at once drawn to their ex-spouses as they are pushed away from them. It's as if the fighting must go on. There is a tension here that one doesn't usually see in stories about divorce, a tension between one's dislike for this person and one's desire to continue with him or her, even if it's just to have someone to punch. Read the story here at Night Train.

On "The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories" by Angela Carter ****

I came to this collection through a book of criticism on werewolves. The critical analyses of these stories seemed to make these tales stand above most other such fantastic pieces in that vein. And now having read the collection, I can certainly say that Carter is a writer whose style makes her one of a kind. I'm most amazed, in this book, by how she so adeptly adapts fairy tales to her own purposes. The tales don't necessarily become modern in place, but they become certainly something different, something literary, than what they are in the homespun versions one gets used to reading.

A large theme tying these stories together is sex and relationships. Psychologists, of course, have long seen connections to sex and death in fairy tales, reading into them vast archetypes that all humans apparently live as. Carter takes that psychological spin, the generality, and respins it into something singular for each of the characters involved--but with the sex more clearly, more overtly part of the tale.

The best story in this collection--by far and away head and shoulders above the others--is the title story. In it, a very young woman goes to live with her new noble husband. Lucky her, marrying a rich man, marrying up--until she discovers he isn't quite what he seems. After the night in which her virginity is taken, the husband gives her keys to every room in the house, but he tells her that one key is not to be used. One can only guess what happens next, when he goes out of town. The woman discovers the grizzly reason her husband has been married so many times. Can she now save herself?

Other tales are more along the lines of reworkings of classic fairy tale plots and characters. In "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," a young woman fails to return to visit her beast as promised, who subsequently comes close to dying of a broken heart. In "The Tiger's Bride," a man loses his daughter to a beast in a game of cards; the beast asks only one thing of her once she is in his custody: to strip naked for him. "The Lady of the House of Love" is a tale of a female vampire who catches a young man in her web (or does he catch her?). "The Werewolf" involves a girl who finds out that her grandmother is just such a thing. "The Company of Wolves" involves a whole family of them, and one woman finally settling on a wolf of her own, as she strips herself into his lair. And "Wolf-Alice" involves a girl raised by wolves who goes to live with a werewolf for lack of a more appropriate place of residence.

On "Ping-pong, 12 Loring Place" by Meagan Cass (1619 words) *****

This one sent chills up my spine. It's a tale about growing up in a divided household. It's a tale about coping. It's a tale about coming to love ping-pong as an escape, as a contest, as a life, as a eulogy. Read the story here at Hobart.

On "Krakatoa" by Simon Winchester ****

I came across mention of this book in a book on world history. It surprised me to learn that the eruption of this volcano back in the early AD disrupted weather patterns and created a famine, that we know this, that this is in the historical record. As it turns out, the historian was perhaps a bit too certain about what happened, at least that was my sense after reading this book.

Winchester isn't as quick to ascribe volcanic eruptions to earlier centuries, though he does talk about them, one around 535 AD and one in 1680. The reason he's less certain is that the historical witness accounts are not entirely reliable, but if other facts in history around the world confirm, perhaps he shouldn't be so conservative. Of course, he's not conservative about the 1883 eruption, because there are plenty of accounts of it, and it is that eruption that is most of the focus of this book.

The eruption occurred at a time when telegraph lines were first making it possible to report news almost instantly, and Winchester talks about how newspapers competed to get to news first. In this case, an English paper managed to beat a German news service to the scoop. Not that it matters to us now, but I'm sure it mattered to the people involved.

Also discussed is the science behind plate tectonics and the history of that theory (drummed up by a "crackpot" generalist and only grudgingly accepted decades later, after his death). Krakatoa, as with all of Indonesia, the set of islands in which it rests, is the result of a hot zone, where two plates converge and the earth's magma comes to the surface, and all of this fairly quickly. The island disappeared completely after the 1883 eruption, but within a few decades, it had reestablished itself above the sea. This too leads to some interesting questions, like how does life come to such an island? Winchester devotes a chapter to this as well, the surprising array of creatures that show up. First, often, are insects--spiders or ants borne on the wind. The plants--again, seeds borne on the wind. How exactly rats get on such an island, I'm not sure, but it's likely the result of stowing away on some human visitor's boat.

It was the biological difference between islands to the west and east of the area that first led to some of the ideas about plate tectonics. The creatures are quite different on either side, showing that the land on either side was one not so close together.

Many died in the 1883 eruption--or really, in its aftermath, the tidal waves that it spawned. Such would have seemed hard to imagine to me a decade ago, but in light of the horrible tidal wave in Asia a few winter's ago and then the one in Japan last year, such events unfortunately no longer seem so impossible. Stories are told in the book of children finding the bones of the dead on beaches thousands of miles away.

The eruption also led to a wave of Islamic unrest in Indonesia. Inspired by the supposed end of the world, some Muslims attempted to overthrow their colonial Danish overseers. Winchester attempts to summarize the tensions between East and West that reverberate to our own day.

But some of the most fascinating parts of the book are the discussions of the weather and how that changed. So much ash ended up in the sky that sunsets were glorious for a year afterward, even as the temperature of the planet dropped by several degrees and crops took a matching hit. We live in a precarious state on this planet.

On "Blubber Boy" by Julie Innis (2101 words) ***

Julie Innis grabbed me from the first sentence--or maybe from the title. The story is about guy working in landscape and about a kid who tortures him--or who he tortures. It's hard to know where this story is going during the first half or so, and that's part of what makes it so good. And then there's this--the main character, someone we can sympathize with, confronted with a situation in which he is uncertain whether to do the right thing or the thing that will benefit him the most (and there's a lot lying on that other thing). I felt my sympathies in this story shifting, which is what gives it its power. Read the story here at JMWW.

On "Phantom Limbs" by D.J. Thielke (2486 words) ***

Thielke's story grabbed me from the first line. The story--and you learn this in the first line--is about an armless boy. Like the story's main character, Cindy, I found myself wondering various things as well, even though in high school I knew a one-armed boy. He always struck me as incredibly agile given the disadvantage he had. Things I remember about him: He was an incredible artist. He carried his books in that one arm. The arm was large. He was in my typing class--and not as fast as the rest of us (I have no idea how the teacher graded him). (There is also an armless man here where I live who does artwork downtown--a very good drawer, though I wonder how he manages not to go cross-eyed, since he uses his mouth to hold the ink pen.)

Cindy too watches in fascination as the boy does things we consider normal. For him, it is just life--he's been that way since birth. He manages.

But that's where this story takes a different turn, for because Cindy's roommate is dating this person, she is drawn into questioning what makes some faulty people lovable and other whole people, like her good-looking self, not. What indeed? Read the story here at the New Delta Review.

On "Happiness You Have to Earn, Not Steal" by Kristy Davis (1759 words) *****

Okay, so this story mixes one narrative line with another to make an obvious statement about both: bedbugs and an old boyfriend. No matter, you can't get rid of them. You obsess about them--how you got them, how they got away. Davis's tale mashes the two up well, but she also has a knack for language that makes this piece more than the sum of its parts. Think dialogue, little lines the narrator remembers, not things we'd find important but this narrator still feels. Think read this story, now, here, at Swink.

On "After He Stays" by Melanie Yarbrough (378 words) ***

Yarbrough short tale is a summary of a relationship metaphorically transformed into a single first night. Here is a couple whose knowledge of one another is still shaky and but whose liking for one another is enough that there is a kind of comfort they wouldn't otherwise feel. In that, we see things as they might be years down the road, and what the ultimate cost of that might be. Read the story here at Ramshackle Review.

On "Soup Bean Annie" by Linda Simoni-Wastila (441 words) ***

Simoni-Wastila conjures up a voice here that is fun to delve into. Yes, in a way, we've seen it before, but not in a long time and not quite like this. It reads as singular here. The story is a simple one, a woman waiting on her man to return. But the piece becomes more than the sum of its parts when one gets to the end, where the author hints at what might really being going on, which is more than we wish to imagine. Read the story here at Pure Slush.

On "Pretenders" by Toshiki Kojo (1943 words) ***

Toshiki Kojo's "Pretenders" is about, as you might guess, the genuiness in our identities and our lives. It's about the roles we play. This piece has a kind of Far Eastern feel to it, for it draws, as I see it, from Buddhist traditions. The "real" us is what we are in the moment. We are not separate from our acts. Then there is the label that others put on us and that we put on ourselves. We can be a groper--or we can actually grope. Which is more real? The thing we do or the thing that we are perceived to be or the thing we perceive ourselves to be? In the end, we're all just breaths and bodies, little packets of energy (matter) along the continuum of the same. Read the story here at In Posse Review.

On "Drowning the Dream" by David Carle ****

This short monograph is a brief history of California water usage and a call to conservation. Carle's basic premise is that California's staggering growth was not only made possible by engineering feats that brought water from the northern and mountainous regions of the state to the coastal and southern regions of the state but was in fact a direct result of such actions. "If you build it," one might say, "they will come." If you make the water available, the population will expand accordingly. The key to solving California's perennial water problem, therefore, isn't making more water available but rather limiting the amount of water available so that fewer people will wish to live in the state.

It's a sort of chicken and egg argument: Does increasing population cause water shortages or does increasing water availability cause increases in population? Carle favors the latter. And he supports his point by following the growth advocates who have helped make California the state that it is.

The book begins with an account of the stable Indian populations that lived in the area before the coming of the European explorers and settlers. And then, it tells a tale of widespread boosterism and exploitation, making its main start with the discovery of gold in 1848. Those who came to California weren't coming with families. They weren't coming to settle. They weren't coming with the idea of setting up homesteads and taking care of the land. They were coming to make a quick buck, with the intention of returning to the land from which they came. As a result, American settlement of the state began within a tradition that has been maintained ever since: get as much as you can from the resources, environment be damned. So much sediment washed down streams in the search for gold, Carle notes at one point, that more than eight times the amount of earth was moved than in the making of the Panama Canal. That's a lot of dirt, a lot of erosion.

Amid these fortune seekers were those who set up shop as landowners, including railroads. Rather than a land of small farms, because of the vast tracts granted to railway interests, California become a state of large farming interests, which continues to this very day. Those large farming interests tend to see land as an investment rather than as a part of the natural order of things. If more can be made by selling said land to urban dwellers, then by all means the land should be turned over accordingly. Hence, schemes that involve bringing water to otherwise unsellable, mostly desert land are commonplace. Once there's water, the land has value, both for farmers and ultimate for suburbanites.

Growth is main argument for such water projects. Projections are made about how much water the state will need in X number of years. Water is thus acquired. Carle argues that projections are their own self-fulfillment. Project for fewer, and you'll have less growth. But less growth would also mean less ability to sell off land at higher prices to incoming state residents.

Familiar tales are told--of how Los Angeles bought up Owens Valley water rights to settle the San Fernando Valley and enrich a few choice landowners who pushed most heavily for the need for said water; of how part of a national park was dammed to provide drinking water to San Francisco; of how the Colorado was used to help grow other Southern California communities. Also explained are how residents more recently have turned down big new water projects that would shift more water from north to south (though Jerry Brown recently brought the rejected Peripheral Canal project back to life, so perhaps more water maneuvering is still to come), and how environmental concerns have started to eat into the continuing willingness to exploit California's limited water supplies.

At some points, Carle hypothesizes on the state that could have been--a Los Angeles with a population of half a million, a Bishop (in the Sierra Nevadas, near Owens Lake) with a similarly sized population. He points to Santa Barbara, which until a drought, had refused to join up with the state's water plan--and as a result had maintained a reasonably small town size and avoided ballooning growth. So perhaps, there is something to Carle's argument.

That's not to say that I buy the argument wholesale. Populations do get larger, and whether those people settle in California or elsewhere, those people still have to settle somewhere and affect some area's water supplies. Granted, limited supplies will limit growth--higher prices for water or for electricity will drive people to settle elsewhere (I'm a former Californian myself after all, and high cost of living I didn't return to the state after college); rationing is annoying and also likely to stir some to go to another place. But simply shifting population around doesn't necessarily solve the problem.

Carle proposes, as do many environmentalists, that human population simply needs to stop growing. Again, it's a nice idea, but one whose implementation I worry about. How exactly do we discourage people from having children, when that seems such a basic human function and need? And is that the only solution, or does wiser use of our resources also play a role? Still, I am in agreement that growth should not be our main motivation for all decisions--or rather, that the definition of economic growth (bigger is better, more is better) needs to be changed in such a way that it recognizes quality (healthier ways of living) not just quantity (higher GDP).

On "Fat As a Cat" by Erin Zulkoski (340 words) ***

This short work is a character study in miniature and almost solely in action. It tells of what happens to a couple after all is over through a simple conversation and of why all IS over. I like how Zulkoski manages to tell us so much about these people in so few words. Read the story here at Negative Suck.

On "Hulking Leviathan the Sun" by Brit Naylor (970 words) ***

Don't look for some kind of hulking plot in this one. Naylor's not writing that kind of story. You won't so much wonder where the story is going as wonder where each and every sentence is going. This is a story about youth and about seasons. The themes have been around forever, but it's the language that counts here. This is summer as it once was, as you wanted it to be, as you want it to be again, as it will never be again, as it never really was, as it should be, as it is in our recantations. This, this is summer. Right here, at the Moulin Review.

On "Introduction to Water in California" by David Carle ****

Similar in concept to Water in Texas, this book runs through the basics of the California water system. While I largely preferred the Texas book's organization (though there was at least one clunky chapter that I'd have pulled to the back as an appendix), Carle had a knack with words that the Texas water book's author did not, making the California book in some ways a better read. Its charts are also particularly fascinating, with for example one given over to sizing rivers by how much water is taken from them for each major metropolitan area of the state.

Because California seems to be the epicenter for water issues and because I grew up in the state, I was much more aware of many of the items recounted in this book than I was in the Texas book. This is also, of course, the fourth book on water I've read in a row, so likewise, there's been some redundancy in terms of things I hadn't known until now.

Like most of the water books, this one starts with a general introduction about water itself (its various unique properties) and about the water cycle (how it goes from land to sea to sky). Added to this section in Carle's book is information about how California's landscape is one of extreme wet and extreme dry, depending on the year (and even during the course of the year, since virtually all of the state's precipitation arrives between December and February). Hence, there is no true average, and water planners have to adjust accordingly. This is one reason that in many ways California's is perhaps one of the most human-manipulated water supplies in the country.

How manipulated it is is made plain in the third section of the book, where Carle discusses the state's water distribution system. Subsections are devoted to each delivery system, each aqueduct.

This isn't to say that natural watersheds are ignored. Those are discussed in the second section of the book, with again subsections given over to each hydrologic region. What is made plain is how water comes mostly from the north and the mountains and is transferred to the south and the shore. This obviously has huge environmental impacts, which are picked up on in the fourth and fifth sections of the book, on the challenges the California water system presents.

As in Texas, overdrafting of groundwater is a problem because once again it is largely unregulated. Whoever owns the land above can use the water below. I certainly would want the rights to dig a well on my own property. But this can lead to problems, since groundwater isn't unconnected to surface water, and if one landowner draws out a huge share, then others who use the same aquifer will suffer. One solution in California has been to recharge groundwater with waste water and other reserves, which has some benefits (as well as costs). It was interesting to learn that Glendale, close to my birth home, had its groundwater despoiled, so that unlike Pasadena, where I grew up, it can no longer get part of its water from beneath the ground.

There has been some negative reaction against the reuse of waste water, but as the author notes, residents often aren't aware that "pristine" water from surface sources often is waste water from cities further up in the watershed. In fact, often, treated waste water is cleaner than water coming into a particular area for just this reason. Such pollution has also led to concerns about Giardia, a waterborne parasite that makes some worry about the safety of backcountry water. Indeed, fecal contamination is somewhat widespread, leading some backpackers to pack bottled water. But as the author notes, this concern is a bit overhyped--most tap water, which is treated, is likely to contain a higher concentration of Giardia cysts, and bottled water (often pulled from said streams or from tap water itself) but without the safety testing is likely to be even worse. The better thing to do is to use common sense--when hiking, pull water upstream and away from camps and trails where there is plenty of flow where it's likely to be cleaner.

In the final challenges section, the author also tackles the need for conservation, showing the ways that cities like Los Angeles have managed to cut back on water use even as the population has increased--through reuse and better use. As with virtually every state, almost every good potential dam site has been dammed, so achieving more efficiencies by storing more isn't really an option. Beyond that, such dams create environmental concerns that the state is now paying closer attention to. The filling in (via sediment buildup) and upcoming destruction or renovation of dams offers opportunities for California to reassess some of its water management strategies.

On "The Hula War" by Paul Silverman (2751 words) ***

This story is full of wonderful turns of phrase and wonderful thoughts on turns of phrases. The author focuses on words that seem, at some level, to make no sense together--the soft and hard combined into one, like "flower headquarters" or "pineapple grenade."

This combination of soft and hard meets also in our characters and in their lives. Christine (the hula girl) and Patrick are couple. The former is soft in her girlish sort of way, the latter a wizened old soldier. Or so it appears. By story's end, it is the sensibilities of Patrick that are shaken and Christine is the resolute force lofting bombs. This is a piece on cultural alienation and cultural adoption, the ways in which we forge identity through our willed connections to the world around us. Read the story here at Moulin Review.

On "Ohio Drive" by Geoffrey Spurgin (323 words) ***

This short piece focuses on a single question, a philosophical one, poised in a book. Place the question now in a different situation and see where it leads. Something tells me that Spurgin doesn't think the answer is as obvious as the protagonists do. Myself, I see the conundrum posed by the question and recognize that sometimes our values aren't always where, perhaps, they should be, just as sometimes we assume one value goes hand in hand with the other. Read the story here at Moulin Review.