Reviewed by Noelle Trost Helen Oyeyemi has long been celebrated for her blending of the surreal with the everyday. She casts reimagined fairytales with a coating of her own formidable imagination—such as in Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird—reworking familiar stories in opulent, detailed, and extravagant ways while maintaining a sharp eye for human relationships. Her latest novel, A New…
By Breen Nolan Howling Women, the debut novel of Write or Die magazine senior editor Shelby Hinte, is a fierce story about friendship, revenge and the emotional scars that never fade. It’s also a book about violence, addiction and female rage. Sabine Haegan, Howling Women’s protagonist, is a woman on the run. She abandoned her crumbling life and marriage in…
Reviewed by Jessica Ribera Evoking riveting murder and courtroom dramas from its start, Victor Suthammanont’s debut novel Hollow Spaces combines the satisfaction of solving a mystery and the adrenaline of a thriller. With tight, descriptive language and carefully developed depictions of emotion and relationships, it also presents as a literary family drama in which the siblings’ opposing beliefs about their…
Edited by Cambria Matlow and Dave Oei Though for many of us these times feel unprecedented, the need to make “good trouble” is timeless. The term, coined by civil rights icon and United States Representative John Lewis, points to taking necessary actions of resistance against systems of oppression in service to our shared humanity and collective liberation. These works, ranging…
By Breen Nolan The characters in Kyle Seibel’s debut short story collection Hey You Assholes (CLASH, 2025) are the freaks and weirdos of the world. They’re the everyday people struggling to figure it out. They’re doing the best they can. Whether Seibel’s writing about a someone experiencing an existential crisis inside of a Taco Bell kitchen, a dying father’s pursuit of pork…
Interviewed by Jessica Ribera This month marks the paperback release of Abby Geni’s second short story collection, The Body Farm. In the collection, Geni has created a laboratory for studying humanity’s relationship to the risks and weaknesses—but also incredible powers—of our bodies. The characters grapple with common yet serious challenges, from physical and mental illness to abuses and lost love.…
Interview by T.J. Tranchell Author John Palisano has worn many hats, among them musician, filmmaker, teacher, president of a writers’ organization, and fan of horror and sci-fi. His latest novel, Requiem, is a gothic-in-space following a crew as they visit an artificial moon, the Eden, designed to serve as a sort of cemetery. Grief, music, and the ever-present threat of…
By Breen Nolan I first met Emily May the summer of 2021 in a Zoom room. We were attending the Southampton Writers Conference and spent five days workshopping our essays with a small group of other writers. It was the height of the Delta variant and the West was burning; everything felt bleak. But May’s writing beckoned to something in…
By Breen Nolan Elizabeth Ellen’s dazzling and darkly funny novel, American Thighs, follows Tatum Grant, a former child actor who steals her daughter’s identity to start her life over as a high school cheerleader. Tatum’s troubled upbringing is the catalyst for her move from Hollywood to Elkhart, Indiana, a town with painful ties to Tatum’s past. Written in interview style,…