Stephen C. Bird’s to be to is to was is a stylish, imaginative collection of interrelated short stories deploying postmodern narrative techniques to dissect the landscape of media, identity, and politics in the current age. Although most stories can stand alone, all of them reference others (whether through characters, settings, or simply through themes […]

Throughout this captivating, darkly comic, often absurdist novel, the narrator and central character takes on multiple identities with the ease of a chameleon changing its colors.

When first met, our protagonist is down and out in San Francisco in the mid-19th century, desperate “to be rid of Erstwhile Me,” a wish granted sooner than expected […]

Author Alane Gray’s wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor turns the tale of her doomed marriage into a raucous, page-turning ride in Terrible Omens: Happiness is the Other Way.

Gray married “Darren Danky” (not his real name) one day after her 28th birthday. After briefly basking in the hormone-induced joy of their recent matrimony, their relationship […]

Damian Myron’s Dig Down is a fast-paced thriller about a man trying to evade capture by his many enemies, including the FBI.

In this novella, Rob Moore is on the run, accused of insider trading, prostitution, bribery, stock manipulation and drug smuggling. The story is told in two time frames. In the first, Rob arrives […]

Ramma Kher has drawn upon her own culture and life travels to create her debut novel The Fifth Dimension: A Story of Courage.

When bright-eyed young Meera marries handsome Mojit and moves with him from India to Canada, she expects the life of a typical Indian immigrant’s wife. Soon, however, Mojit is tragically killed, and […]

In Painless, Marty Thornley crafts a horrific tale of a medical trial gone awry.

The novel’s protagonist, Greg Owens, is a construction worker who injured his back badly in a fall. His attempt to manage his chronic pain through the use of illicit medication costs him his marriage. To get his life back on track, […]

Teachers Have 9 Lives: An Underground to Surface Exposure, by Hannah Hope, is a sort of slipstream/postmodernist novel lauding the value of teachers in a decaying world and written in a mixture of poetic and literary experimental styles.

The first two-thirds of Teachers Have 9 Lives takes place in an unknown time and space, through […]

In Reframing Poverty, Eric Meade offers a nuanced and scholarly perspective on poverty that reframes the debate over its antecedents and its resolution.

In Part I of his work, Meade declares, “[p]overty…is an emotional construct,” and our emotive response should play a significant role in its definition. Meade applies this argument to four explanations of […]

Mateo Monda’s novel, Midtown Madhatter, centers on the life of Peter “Petey” Walsh, who reconnects with his childhood buddies after a decade spent in Mexico.

Petey hasn’t seen his partners in crime since he left Seattle to forget about a girl— then found another girl and married her. A chance to reconnect arrives when his […]

Education is understandably one of the prominent social issues of our day. In this book, Bryce Hess presents his approach to the practical matter of educating students.

After presenting brief reflections on the teacher/student relationship, Hess begins by exploring broad concepts, like “Truth” and “Knowledge” and works down to less abstract matters of education. Each […]