Scattering the Ashes Late, late at night, he searches for her birth certificate, for their marriage license, for snapshots of the two of them, together. Morning begins with daylight splayed across the surface of the frozen pond behind their house. It is late February 2022 and still this winter threatens. Oak leaves, brown and sere, hang from limbs like cast-off…
TCR Daily
By Kaia Gallagher An award-winning novelist and short story writer, Erika Krouse published her first book of nonfiction, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, in March of 2022. Described by The Washington Post as masterful and mesmerizing, Tell Me Everything recounts Krouse’s role as a private investigator who gathered evidence during a five-year investigation into a…
By Peter Aronson I am a writer. Yes, I am. By day, I write for the municipality. I write forms for every conceivable aspect of life. My favorite last month: Municipal Sidewalk Chewing Gum Eradication Program, Citizen’s Report: Number of pieces removed per square foot: __________ Type of gum removed, if known: mint _____; fruit _____; bubble_____; other _____ By…
By Rob Bowman Patrick O’Neil spent the golden age of American punk rock touring as a roadie and road manager with now-legendary bands Dead Kennedys, Flipper, T.S.O.L., Subhumans, and others. That time—the misadventures on the road, the grime and needs of addiction, and the violence of the punk stage—fills the pages of O’Neil’s new memoir, Anarchy at the Circle K:…
By Joanna Laufer Ten days after my mother’s surgery, she asked me to look at her body without a breast. As the doctor removed the gauze dressing and Steri-Strips, the nurse held up a hand mirror by the stem. I was twenty-three. I stood beside her, leaning against blue crinkled paper on the exam table, squinting at the mirror like it…
Celebrities often take an omnipotent position in modern society, acting as paragons, villains, and jesters of our time. Their opinions are met with adoration or disdain, satire, and protest. They influence style, commerce, and politics, and we, the readers, guide their rises and their falls. They walk the fine lines of artists, athletes, influencers, and journalists who must balance both…
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.…