Review: I Was A Champion Then by Alfred A. Meyer
I Was A Champion Then: Twelve Stories About Quiet Injustice, Small Rebellions and Restless Hope is a collection of essays and short stories compiled by the author’s son, Christopher Paul Meyer. A book decades in the making, Alfred Meyer had 30,000 pages of unpublished work when he died in 2012. Alfred Meyer writes eloquently about baseball, childhood wargames, lovelorn women, race and other topics that seem at once deeply American and universal. Meyer writes about big American topics; he may not have completed the Great American Novel, but the tenor of these stories suggests he was well on his way.[…]
Insanity by Increments by Alaric Cabling is a work of Gothic literary short fiction about people on the edge – isolated from other people, and from themselves.. No one acts predictably, nor does the world around them. It’s not just the characters who have dark impulses, the world they inhabit is just as sinister.
TZAK – How Time Travel Began by Cindy Shearer is a futuristic novella about one girl’s experience with time travel in a post-apocalyptic America, set in Yucatan, Mexico.
Atoms and Other Small Pieces is a short collection of fiction by author L. N. Nino, with the general theme of small details and the transition into horrible, deeply humanistic developments.
Humor is hard. Pathos is much easier. Show a character being chased by a monster, and if you’re good at your craft, readers will sweat and squirm. Show poor orphaned children dying of hunger, and you may draw tears from your readers even if you aren’t that good. But make a joke, and who knows? A sense of humor is like taste in food. What appeals to one person might repulse another. How do you feel about fried chicken livers? See what I mean? So I always admire an author who writes humor, especially the kind of humor that you’ll […]
Infinite Ending: Ten Stories by Frank Marcopolos is the resulting book of a challenge to write a story a month over ten months. The ten stories follow two hikers on a long journey, a college baseball player assessing his prospects, erotica writers ruminating about the publishing business, a wounded soldier, and other tales where characters assess their present and future condition. By his own declaration in the foreword, these are “postmodern literary fiction,” not stories with high-concept premises or tidy endings.
Suicide Lettres, a book of twenty short stories is the brilliant and dark debut by Fargo-based writer Jack O’Riley. Starting with an unbelievably imaginative and original tale, this is the showcase of a talented writer.
“It’s too late for him too, said the man in a high-pitched voice, drooling in anticipation, like a dog with a bone. Eli stood frozen, his brain issued a hundred different commands that his body would not obey. The man let out bone chilling cackle and, with lightning quickness, sunk the blade of the scalpel into Eli’s left thigh. The pain hit Eli like a train and he was instantly brought back to reality. He looked over at the parrot, who was now calm and quiet. Its mysterious gray eyes connected with Eli’s, and he felt as if […]