Delightful new short fictions by the inimitable Parker Tettleton. OR is a travelogue of language via relationships—a state of endless conjunctions & several abbreviations. It’s also a meditation on the idea of home & a crooked bookend of sorts to This Is A City.

Another in the Ravenna series of fabulous short fictions by Kim Chinquee.  Per James Thomas (editor of Flash Fiction, Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction International): “This book is brilliant, every bit of it.  One delight after another.  Chinquee makes the English language sing–amazing sentences, beautiful lines, incredible strokes.  Dazzling.”

From Aimee Parkison review now available at Rain Taxi:

”Kim Chinquee’s Wetsuit takes hold of the reader, making one feel there is a fine line between fiction and real- ity. Precisely written in a clean, clear, minimal- ist style, these brief stories are about the ways we protect ourselves from pain while immersing ourselves in life the way a fierce swimmer immerses herself in the deepest of waters.  These flash fictions stand on their own, but if one envisions the women in the stories as the same woman, they also have a sense of continuity, so it is easy to read the book as an episodic short novel with flash chapters.”

See the full review on the Rain Taxi website.

Also see the interview by Nancy Stohlman at:  https://nancystohlman.com/2020/01/02/so-you-wrote-a-book-kim-chinquee/?fbclid=IwAR3c_xk2iVF1bc5xyQtp4b8Ff4CyQm19iBY2xYLQ3uFyL2DxnZJEwPRBHs0

The Lands Betweenby Faruk Ulay is a unique and intelligent book reminiscent of Invisible Cities by Calvino and Beckett’s late prose.  It collects 33 short observations by this artist, writer and Turkish émigré living in the Los Angeles area, that examines the world with bafflement, desire, rapture and despair—a cosmography of delight and dismay that, for all its strangeness in these short tales, bears on our own world to a disturbing degree.

Faruk Ulay was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1957.  He moved to the United States in 1982 and lives in Pasadena, California. He is the author of fourteen books–eight collections of short fiction, two novels, and several volumes of non-fiction work. His independent publishing project Locus Novusfocuses on interdisciplinary experiments that incorporate both visual and the textual elements, the results presented as artist’s books.

Sample:

This place is not a desert. It is the Land of Uncertain

Things. Even the rocks and earth are uncertain here. One

sleeps and awakens in an endless twilight. The days are

a woven wall of mist. The roads zigzag, but the sharpest

curves can be taken without touching the brake pedal.

Outside the doors of the houses, starched tablecloths lean

against the wall. Tasteless meals are eaten at ironing boards.

The wine is the shade of water….

Find a river. Lean into it. Let it scratch and soften your

skin. Did you ever think that blood flows through your

veins to scratch its itch? You will capture this sense the

scratching awakens as the river rubs past you. If you treat

life gently, you’ll notice that it too rubs your temperaments

in this way. I know. You are as far away from living, as

you are from the river. First, find the river. You will then

capture life. The water guards its beauty with its flow.

This latest from Kim Chinquee is a collection of flash and short stories, gripping and gritty tales of life, love, and our common humanity.  ”Kim Chinquee writes tenderly about tough women—soldiers, cops, survivors of violence—and brings a fierce empathy and lyricism to these stories of hardscrabble lives. Shot Girls is a remarkable collection; Chinquee is an important and necessary writer for these times.”—Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will and Stay Awake

Sixth entry in the Ravenna series that brings together three similar or dispirit writers in one volume.  This time Lindsay Stern takes us on a tour of the Cambodian Dictionary; Philip Quinn transports us poetically into the spirit of the Minoan, Jefferson Navicky instructs us with fictions on the uses of a Library.

Starting out with three poems based on letters from Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, from James Agee to Father Flye, from an unknown Finn with an unpronounceable last name to Bertrand Russell,  the book moves on to a minimalist memoir centered on a house then on to a collection of short, lyrical prose pieces selected by the author, including “In Hartmann Hall,” “Im Zoologischen Garten,” “Sisters,” “Astoria Finns” and “The Ferry.”  Illustrated expressively; or, rather, illuminated by Cooper Renner.