“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,…
It wasn’t that I was bad at teaching. All the qualities that had made me a terrible student in high school made me a great teacher now. I moved fast, I made a lot of jokes, and it was okay if I went off topic. (The only useful thing I learned in my teacher credential program was how to get…
We are the California kingsnakes of the Canary Islands. Perhaps you’ve heard the troubling reports. We proliferate out of control, our habitat is expanding, our “densities are through the roof.” The EU has banned our further import. But how did we end up here, unwitting invaders on a volcanic rock in the Atlantic, so far from the San Diego pet…
Before I could scoop the meager contents of the plate into one bite—a small pork chop, a spoonful of rice, lentejas, nothing more—a honk sounded out from the busy thoroughfare outside the house. My abuela perked her head up, discerning for the honk amid an endless line of traffic. Another honk. Then another. She sucked at her teeth and shuffled…