Cal didn’t know why he kept checking his phone. He was in the red. He knew that. Seventeen percent. He still had service for a little while. He would find a way to charge it. Soon. The percentage hadn’t changed in the last several minutes, and he told himself that was the last time he would check it. When he…
Drifting up to the bare light bulb overhead, Judy watches herself below on the concrete basement floor, her petite Peter Pan self with short blond hair and a nose that Jack describes as either “perky” or “pointed,” depending on his mood and hers. Peter Pan with crow’s feet. Is this truly her marriage, she wonders, her life? Pages drop from…
I watch Vin ride his windrower slowly through the green hayfield in the early evening. Three pronghorn stand in the long grass, chewing the harvest, but Vin doesn’t seem to mind. The animals, with their tan and white coats and inward-curved horns, belong to an ancient species and look like they’d be more at home on the Serengeti. Mammatus clouds…
“I am the world’s greatest magician bank robber. Watch as I fly through these bars on my magic smoke cape. Mumbo Jumbo!” Owen muttered to himself as he hung upside down on the monkey bars in the school’s playground before homeroom. It was a cold November morning, and every word Owen said transformed itself into a tiny cotton candy cloud. …
Interviewed by Julie Colbrese With previous novels, award-winning author Jake Hinkson found success exploring the dark side of his home state of Arkansas—a far cry from the seedy Los Angeles depicted in the Raymond Chandler books he read in his youth. But with his eighth book, You Will Never See Me, Hinkson takes readers on another twisted tale of crime…
By C.E. McKenna Los Angeles writer Kate Maruyama has been widely published in the horror genre, including a supernatural piece TCR recommended for a Pushcart Prize. But her most recent book, Alterations, is more appropriately shelved next to intergenerational dramas like Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. It follows three women in the Morello family—Adriana, Lizzie, and…
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…
5 Weeks Cassie sunk into the shadows of the pharmacy’s exterior wall. Just thirty minutes after sundown and Brookings was already shrouded in an obscuring darkness. She’d thought that by her second year living there, she would have adjusted to this less than likeable detail of life in South Dakota, but no. Spotlighted under the fluorescent glow of the streetlight,…