The Coachella Review – Page 50 – The Coachella Review

Swimming Around the Edges

By: Trevy Thomas

After living in Virginia for a year, I was feeling the loss of friends I’d left behind. Meeting people in my new life was difficult, as I worked from home alongside my husband in his art business. My human contact was almost exclusively through the Internet, and I felt increasingly lonely.

Not knowing where else to look, I turned to the very computer that was keeping me isolated to search for community. I found a group of women about my age that hosted events somewhat near my home. After participating in the online forums a while, I felt comfortable enough to attend my first gathering: a small lunch at one of the women’s houses.

TCR Talks with Rebecca Makkai

BY: Kaia Gallagher

Acclaimed by Vanity Fair to be a rising literary star, Rebecca Makkai demonstrates her versatile storytelling ability in Music for Wartime, a collection of 17 stories written over a 13-year period. Reflecting on Makkai’s diverse career, the stories vary in their narrative structure but connect around the central themes of music and war. To tie them together, Makkai has added three oral history accounts shared by her paternal grandmother, Ignacz Rozsa, a famous actress and novelist in Hungary, and her father, Adam Makkai, a Hungarian-born linguist.

Assholes and Stanky Glitter

March 18, 2018 Nonfiction TCR Daily The Coachella Review

By: Arch Jamjun

I have been a server for almost twenty years. When I say that out loud, I feel like a big failure, and when I think about my parents, how they went from being children Sally Struthers might hug to USA professionals, I feel like an even bigger failure. This feeling especially haunted my twenties when, after trying pharmacology, education, nutrition, paralegal studies, nursing, and even accounting, I always found myself inept. Server money has been a big comfort. It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you can earn a middle-class income while garbage-mouthing leftover food and guzzling wine you could never afford in half of the above-mentioned careers. But my mom has an interesting perspective: “Oh you are like a food prostitute.” In a sense, that’s true. When you’re a server, you’re constantly thinking, “Am I too old for this?” and I think only sex workers and athletes ponder that as much. Also, when you’re a server, people often ask you, “But what do you really want to do?” And I’m like, “Ummm, be the next Whitney Houston.”

Bill of Fare

March 18, 2018 Nonfiction TCR Daily The Coachella Review

By: Susan Olding

Appetizers

Pimento-stuffed olives
Celery with cream cheese
Julienned carrots
Angels on horseback
Pigs in blankets

Your career begins early, before your head even clears the kitchen counter. The crystal dish that your mother places in your hands feels much heavier than you expect. Pressing it to your chest, you look down at your red patent party shoes, nervous you might skid on the kitchen’s vinyl tile or trip on the lip of the living room carpet. Music greets you, music and smoke; clinking ice cubes and the smells of mingled perfumes. The women’s faces glow. Their dresses rustle like the plumage of exotic birds. Like birds, they coo and sing at your offerings, pecking and cooing while watching you with bright eyes. Someday you would like to join their dazzling flock. But for now, you observe them observing you.

TCR Talks with Tyler Dilts

March 12, 2018 Fiction Interview TCR Daily The Coachella Review

By: Felicity Landa

Tyler Dilts spent his childhood investigating police work, hoping to one day follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, he found himself to be much more interested in writing about crime than pursuing a career solving it and has since become the author of five books on crime fiction, including the Edgar Award nominated, Come Twilight, and the forthcoming, Mercy Dogs. His chilling and sometimes terrifying novels explore the complex and haunted characters of the Long Beach homicide department and the murders they solve.

Book Review: Jessica Keener’s “Strangers in Budapest”

March 7, 2018 Book Review Fiction TCR Daily The Coachella Review

by John Flynn-York

Image result for strangers in budapest

In Jessica Keener’s new novel, Strangers in Budapest, the lives of two ex-pat Americans become intertwined in the titular city in the 1990s. Annie is unhappy and shiftless, at loose ends after a move to Budapest with her husband and their young son. Meanwhile, Edward, an elderly man, is in Budapest for one reason only: to find the man he thinks murdered his daughter. When they cross paths, they find common ground in this quest. Edward is a cause Annie can invest her energy into—something she’s been lacking since moving to Budapest. But when she is drawn deeper into Edward’s scheming, she begins to question whether she’s merely helping an old man or abetting his delusions.

The Sophia Poems

February 24, 2018 Poetry TCR Daily The Coachella Review

By: Patrick Reichard

The Cliffhanger Dilemma

Let’s say you are holding two loved ones over the edge of a cliff, one on each arm. If you had to drop one in order to save the other one, which person do you save? Mom or Dad? Brother or sister? Spouse or kid? Kid 1 or kid 2? Do you drop both because the choice is too equal? People try to say that they would use their super-strength adrenaline to pull both up. That’s a cop-out. You have to choose. For me, the answer is easy: Mom, my brother Dan, and spouse. I have an answer to the kid question, but I’m not going to write it down. Though, if the situation arises, I know what I’m doing.

A Dozen for Delbert

February 24, 2018 Nonfiction TCR Daily The Coachella Review

BY: JAMES KELLY

“Delbert was a straight one percent man,” Mister Spiffy told me. “But, he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. And don’t forget to call that order in to Dezzy’s the night before. Dezzy’s Doughnut Kastle. Number’s on the visor. Tell her you want a dozen for Delbert. That you’ll be there right at seven when she opens to pick them up. And remember, just hand him the box of jelly doughnuts and shut up. Don’t say a word. Delbert speaks when he’s good and ready, not before.” Mister Spiffy ran a one-van, two-man carpet-cleaning business. I worked for him one summer and part of that fall. He paid a guy to paint the number 18 real big on both sides. But, like I say, he only had the one van. “Client sees that,” he explained, “it makes a good impression. They think we got eighteen vans instead of just the one. Gives them confidence. Means they can count on Mister Spiffy to handle any volume of business they throw his way. Guaranteed.”

The Red Shoebox Guitar

February 10, 2018 Nonfiction TCR Daily The Coachella Review

By: Roy Dufrain

On hot Saturdays the neighborhood men took refuge in their garages. They opened their garage doors and ran portable fans, and they turned up the Giants game on the transistor radios that sat on their workbenches. The men fixed things and made things and drank bottled beer out of old round-shouldered refrigerators. Wives and children were generally not invited.

That summer of 1966, Bobby Highfill and I were both eight years old. Our mothers were forever shooing us out from under their feet and into the great outdoors, which in our corner of suburbia consisted of a few square blocks of housing tract and one dead-end street of undeveloped lots known to local kids as the Trashlands, where Bobby and I both served honorably in the Great Dirt Clod Wars of Concord, California.

Book Review: Lawrence Davis’ “Blunt Force Magic”

February 10, 2018 Book Review Horror The Coachella Review

By: A.E Santana

Janzen Robinson has been trying to forget his past and move forward with a boring, mundane life as a delivery man. This intention is interrupted when he saves a young woman from a Stalker—an evil from the Abyss—and is thrown back into a life of magic, monsters, and the pain he was trying to forget. With help from old allies and new companions, Janzen does his best to save the life of an innocent while not getting everyone killed in the process.

Blunt Force Magic is the debut novel of Lawrence Davis, a U.S. Army infantryman who served three tours overseas. This novel is the first in the Monster and Men