By Nicholas Belardes In Tyrell Johnson’s second novel, The Lost Kings, Jeanie King has to stitch together a violent, uncertain past in order to understand the mysterious disappearance of her brother and father. We’re right there with her, tight amid all her reliability and unreliability as a narrator. At times, her traumatic story reads like a case study of the…
by Melinda Gordon Blum The memoir Nein, Nein, Nein! has us at its subtitle. The “one man” is none other than Jerry Stahl, whose acerbic humor and kinetic prose transported his book Permanent Midnight into a fever dream classic, a standout in the crowded “junkie memoir” genre. Who better to pen a modern-day reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust…
by Allison Scagliotti I remember when Tower Records shuttered for good. Gen Xers wept openly, bemoaning the death of their community locus. Too young to have integrated into a scene of my own, I wondered what my version of this loss might be one day. My view from the minivan passenger seat was as much about deciphering the L.A. in…
White Space Tell me about these white spaces you write y o u r s e l f i n t o. They look so clean on the page. Does it feel free? Giving words bounteous space around …
by Trey Burnette Making mortgage payments, paying off credit card and student loan debt, and season tickets to the opera are excellent reasons for becoming an accomplice to your revolting non-boyfriend/boyfriend’s murders. At least they are for Charlie from Leitchfield. And even though his sort of love interest, Jignesh, is “a pompous sea monster from the depths of the Indian…
Girding Up The coat still fit. The arms, the chest, all of it in brown corduroy. And his wool stocking hat. Also out of vogue, that he’d thought he lost, he now pulls over his ears.…
Reviewed by Peter Mladinic Poems are written by human beings “alone in a room” with language. They come out of lived lives. The poems in Madrigals come out of Caroline Goodwin’s lived life—things she has touched and ground she has stood on, alone and with others. Sometimes, that ground is a floor in a room, other times a forest floor,…
Something that’s weird about me is that I have oven mitts for hands. Not actual oven mitts; that’s just what one of my old foster parents called them. He said it meant I was going to grow a lot in a few years. It never really mattered much to me, except for it looking kind of funny with the rest…
