Short Stories Book Reviews

Atoms and Other Small Pieces is a short collection of fiction by author L. N. Nino, with the general theme of small details and the transition into horrible, deeply humanistic developments.

The first story, eponymous “Atoms,” compares and contrasts typical storytelling with the emotional existence of a non-sentient protagonist – a chemical compound – with the circumstances of a human tragedy; the second, “Debris,” centers on the story of a loveless mother-child relationship; the third, “Pennies,” ascribes itself an extended letter from a self-described philosopher of modern masculine virtue and creative genius who has fallen into difficult and unfair circumstances; […]

Infinite Ending: Ten Stories by Frank Marcopolos is the resulting book of a challenge to write a story a month over ten months. The ten stories follow two hikers on a long journey, a college baseball player assessing his prospects, erotica writers ruminating about the publishing business, a wounded soldier, and other tales where characters assess their present and future condition. By his own declaration in the foreword, these are “postmodern literary fiction,” not stories with high-concept premises or tidy endings.

These are rich quick-paced stories where not a lot happens, but still manages to be page-turning because of Marcopolos’ […]

Suicide Lettres, a book of twenty short stories is the brilliant and dark debut by Fargo-based writer Jack O’Riley. Starting with an unbelievably imaginative and original tale, this is the showcase of a talented writer.

These stories are so unusual that they take the reader into a world of lives twisted and broken by their own doing, spirals that fall out of control with unfolding events.

The opener is stunning and abstract, with a freshly-skinned animal pelt doing the talking; the following tales don’t get easier, but it is this grand uneasiness that takes the reader back to a […]

Cate Baum, editor of SPR reviews SPR Awards Shorts winner Searching For Paradise by Gerard Marconi.

It is rare that a male American writer writes about his feelings and experiences in relation to others, especially women. Offerings over the years have been rather narcissistic perspectives in the form of Kerouac, Thompson and Bukowski, with females no better off than a hatstand. We never really learn how the male protagonist feels about the women in their stories, past the sexual attractiveness or hysteria of each one, and god forbid we learn his weaknesses.

Enter Gerard Marconi, author of Searching For Paradise […]

This slim volume of short stories works as something of a fugue on grief and loss, featuring fragile women at both ends of their adult lives. Strangely, the two stages are not that different, at least not for these women, and that is perhaps the saddest thing in these rather sad stories.

The characters in these stories are, for the most part, weak, wispy women—widows adrift, and vaporous young women with overbearing mothers (more than once called dragons)—who seem not so much unable to cope as unable to navigate when the men in their lives abandon them or, more often, […]

Philip Gaber’s new anthology “Epic Sloth – Tales of The Long Crawl”  yet again hits the mark with post-Postmodern American writing. There isn’t much of this sort of literature around any more and this stuff needs to exist. From Kerouac to Selby to Yates to Palahniuk, Gaber pulls together the sum of these writers to pour out anew what it means to be a young disillusioned man in today’s America.

There is a sure East Coast,  self-effacing vibe to this writing, but there are tales set all over the US with all kinds of people involved. Young Americans seem to […]