Flash Fiction Short Story Reviews

Narrative Magazine/Jill McCorkle/Darlin' Neal/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:44:00 +0000

Nominating Editors: Tom Jenks and Rebecca Kaden

Narrative Magazine was founded in 2003 as a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the literary arts in the digital age and to encouraging readership around the world and across generations. Narrative offers weekly updated contents and an extensive archive, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, and special features by the best established and emerging talents available anywhere today. Each year Narrative publishes first-run works by more than three hundred authors and artists, and many of those works go on to be included in prominent anthologies. Narrative writers have received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Rea Award, the Rona Jaffe Award, and many other honors.

In selecting works for publication, Narrative editors look for stories with a strong narrative drive, with characters we can respond to as human beings, and with effects of language, situation, and insight that are intense and total. We look for works that have the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and the world. In all work, whether written or visual, we watch for originality, intelligence, and sophistication in the handling of the form. And we look for work that will engage our readers’ sense of pleasure.

One recent story we’re very proud of is Jill McCorkle’s “Magic Words,” which appeared in our Fall 2008 issue and was later selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009, New Stories from the South 2009, Best of the Net 2008, and the Million Writers Award Notable Stories 2008. A title such as “Magic Words” promises a lot, and the story delivers, when a middle-aged wife and mother on her way to a tryst is waylaid by a teenager in trouble. In McCorkle’s hands, please and thank you take on raw desire and regret, menace, and, finally, supplicating hope in the face of all that denies it. “Magic Words” embodies mastery and the sheer pleasure of a great story.

Nominated Short Story: “Magic Words” - Jill McCorkle

Reviewed by Darlin' Neal:

Jill McCorkle’s short story, “Magic Words,” opens with Paula Blake sneaking away to meet a coworker who waits in a hotel room. She escapes a husband busily writing the weekly newsletter that warns the neighborhood of dangerous creatures: coyotes, raccoons and bats. She drops off her loud teenagers at the movies. Behind she leaves a house of things untended: laundry, dirty dishes, an unscooped litter box. She is a guilt ridden mother and wife distracted by the feel of her thin panties and fantasies of the man she’s kissed on a stairwell. Once alone in the car she removes her turtleneck to reveal the thin black lace camisole she spent hours that day choosing instead of buying groceries. The story teases us in toward the consummation of the affair, thoughts of the man in the room waiting, ringing her cell phone impatiently.

The story then takes a shift which at first feels off, a point of view shift to kids creepy crawling through the neighborhood, a phrase their rough leader has borrowed from the Manson family after reading Helter Skelter. The leader makes evil plans and terrorizes his followers. The narration hones in on Lauren and the terrifying trap in which she has placed herself by coming along with this group. Paula will think of her later as, “the ‘Don’t’ poster child of this town, the local object lesson in how quickly a child can go bad.”

The narration takes another turn, from these kids outside into another home and point of view, to the recently widowed Agnes Hayes alone and regretting retirement from school teaching. She longs for her son’s forgiveness and companionship. She practices what she will say to him, “It’s your mom. Please talk to me.”

The shifts that at first may make the reader trip now find a rhythm as we go back and forth seamlessly through these stories and stumble upon the connections. Not only does McCorkle grip the reader with tension, she makes us care about these characters, even the cats and dogs. It’s breathtaking how she brings all the separate stories together in the end, all the stories of longing away from and toward home with all the dangers teeming outside. The unexpected and winding journey McCorkle takes the reader on is well worth the read.

Reviewer's Bio:

Darlin' Neal is the author of the short story collection, Rattlesnakes and The Moon, which will be published by Press 53 in March 2010. Her work has appeared in dozens of magazines including The Southern Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, The Mississippi Review, Per Contra, and Smokelong Quarterly. She is assistant professor in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Wag's Revue/Raleigh Holiday/Scott Doyle/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:04:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Sandra Allen

Wag's Revue is an online-only literary quarterly that debuted this spring. Following a successful and controversial first issue, we've continued to pioneer this web-based literary magazine, which aspires to marry the freedoms of the Internet with the strictures of a traditional printed quarterly, creating something entirely new (a 'wag,' if you will). It's an exciting solution, I think, to print's demise, and a good read for anyone interested in the future of the American literary quarterly. Issue 2 features an interview with T.C. Boyle, perfect anagrams of Shakespeare sonnets by poet K. Silem Mohammad, nonfiction by Stephen Elliott and more.

I'd like to nominate Raleigh Holiday's most recent story in our publication, titled "Artificial Light" for review. In this story of a vengeful puppet setting fire to her television host boss, Holiday dives into a world that is at once absurd and incredibly haunting. Told from the perspective of the cameraman who captured the blaze on film, the hilarity of this short piece is underscored by a deep, human (puppet) tragedy. In my opinion, few could pull off such a feat of such wit and grace as Raleigh Holiday.

Nominated Short Story: "Artificial Light" - Raleigh Holiday

Reviewed by Scott Doyle:

This isn’t the kind of story I normally lean towards as a reader, but I was won over by its infectious verve and loopy imagination.

One of the reasons the story succeeds is because it quickly establishes a certain tone and never strays from that: it’s a story that knows what it is. We are immediately plunged into the set of "Murphy’s Puppet Pirate Hour." Captain Murphy, the host, flirts inappropriately with the puppet cast. By the end of the second paragraph, one of them, Sissy Slimbritches, has retaliated and set the Captain on fire. That the reader doesn’t resist or question the absurd goings-on (and from here things just get weirder) is testament to the power of confidence and velocity in fiction. The reader is most suggestible in that opening paragraph or two: the writer can get away with just about anything if it is done with speed and confidence.

I won’t ruin the story by trying to summarize, but Holliday packs a surprising number of turns into three pages. "Artificial Light" is entertaining and quite funny, and though it’s hardly a ‘statement’ story, it does seem to touch on the nature of staged illusion, depending on how one chooses to read it.

Although velocity is one of the story’s chief attributes, the writer knows when to slow down. There are a number of well-turned descriptions, including that of the puppet Sissy’s painted lashes “flapping with the celerity of a hummingbird’s wing.” For all its speed, the story never feels rushed. And, important for a story that could wear on the reader if over-extended, the author knows when to get out.

This is a story written with great energy, confidence, and precision.

Reviewer's Bio:

Scott Doyle writes and reviews short stories in Los Angeles. He has stories in print in New Madrid and River Oak Review, and online at Night Train, Sotto Voce, and 580 Split. He reviews short story collections for The Short Review, and blogs at Lit Scribbler.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

ZYZZYVA/Cory Garfin/Jim Ruland/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:03:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Howard Junker

ZYZZYVA is a 25-year-old triquarterly journal of West Coast writers & artists. In each issue we offer a handful of writers who are appearing in print for the first time.

I like Cory Garfin's debut story, "The Carousel," because it's sweet and unexpected and in the great tradition of George Saunders and the fabulous microcosm.

Nominated Flash Fiction: "The Carousel" - Cory Garfin

Reviewed by: Jim Ruland

Cory Garfin’s publishing debut is short and sweet – just like a ride on the carousel that is the centerpiece of this curious tale. A young man comes home to find that his parents have turned his bedroom into a carnival attraction. Baffled by their decision to install a carousel in his room so shortly after he’s left it, he returns to investigate but doesn’t get the homecoming he expects.

In just under 500 words, Garfin skillfully renders the young man’s family in vivid detail. It’s precisely the kind of high concept, absurdist drama that goes over well at readings. As an employee of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, Garfin likely has observed countless writers read from their work and he’s learned a thing or two about what works on the page as well as the stage.

In spite of its unusual premise, “The Carousel” is fairly conventional, earnest even, which makes it a bit of a throwback. While Garfin doesn’t leave the reader much to ponder once the music stops, he delivers an enjoyable ride.

Reviewer's Bio:

Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collection Big Lonesome and the host of Ve rmin on the Mount, an irreverent reading series in the heart of L.A.’s Chinatown.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

Monkeybicycle/Amy Guth/Craig Terlson/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:48:00 +0000

Nominating editor: Steven Seighman

Monkeybicycle is a literary journal that lives both online and in print. The Web site is updated twice weekly (Mondays and Fridays), and we put out two issues of the print edition each year. The content on the Web site is often funny, often short, and always entertaining. Once in a while, there's a more serious piece in there as well. We love reading just about anything and really try to mix it up a bit. The print editions are often the opposite of that—more serious with a splash of humor thrown in on occasion. Our fifth issue, however, was all humor. Guest-edited by our web editor, Eric Spitznagel, it really pushed the envelope with some saucy pieces from well-known comedians like Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, and David Cross.

Over the years, Monkeybicycle has been consistent in presenting entertaining and well-written material to its reading audience. Twice, we've had stories (once from the Web site and once from the print edition) included in the annual Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology, and have had several "notable" stories in there as well. We hope to continue putting out the highest-quality material for everyone who is interested, well into the upcoming years. Monkeybicycle has recently become an imprint of Dzanc Books, which makes this much easier to do through additional funding and promotion. We love what we do, love what our writers do, and are happy to give it to the world.

"Feet in Socks" was part of a holiday marathon we ran on our Web site in 2007. There was a different story up each day in December, always relating somehow to Christmas or whatever else was celebrated. Often, the stories were parodies, or at least funny. One piece was even a cartoon. But "Feet in Socks" stands out because it is none of those things. Coming from an incredibly talented writer, this story is both heart-wrenching and heart-warming, all at once. It tells a story of love through the years—the ups and downs. And what better way to convey what the holidays are all about?

Nominated Flash Fiction: "Feet in Socks" - Amy Guth

Reviewed: by Craig Terlson

The deathbed scene has been a bit of a cliché in fiction for a long time. Unfortunately, this type of scene often comes off as forced, melodramatic, tired, and worst of all, lacking in truth. “Feet in Socks” is a welcome exception to all those overdone and overwrought story moments. An added bonus, and it’s an impressive one, is that she does it in less than 800 words.

Flash fiction at its best captures a moment in time, something brought forward, crystalline, to the reader’s eyes—but it is usually just a moment. Guth is able to expand that to an entire lifetime, which is what most amazes me about this story. She begins at the deathbed, but right away there is something in the voice that tells me this is not the same old scene—maybe it is the narrator’s realization that wanting her husband to die by candlelight was both melodramatic and comforting. The further contemplation of this light signaled to me that another type of story was about to be told.

The use of the other character, a nurse, is the perfect device to tell the fuller story of this couple’s life. Moving into backstory in fiction can often result in a loss of tension, and a molasses dragging of pace. But here again, Guth’s voice first transitions seamlessly into the past and then paints a vivid picture of how the couple met.

“Beautiful under my thick glasses and my knobby elbows and knees. Beautiful beneath my frizzy hair and thin lips. Arthur, let us not kid ourselves, couldn't see past any of these things, nor could he see past his large-breasted girlfriend, Joyce. I wanted to not hate her.”

I am in awe of these four sentences. I’ve read whole chapters that don’t show this much depth of character. Maybe I am being hyperbolic here, but it is only to say that when compression in short fiction works, and works really well, it is Hemingway’s iceberg theory on steroids.

As their story unfolds I find myself caring deeply for both of the characters. I think this is because of the truth that is evoked. The description of the wife, then a young girl, picturing a sexy scene about to take place, only to find the reality to be more plain, yet more deeply satisfying, resonates with anyone who has seen an early love affair grow into a long term relationship.

It is this connection with the characters that gives power to the closing line. In a scant few paragraphs I know this couple, I know how they began, I sensed how they lived, and now as she sits by her husband’s bedside, I want to weep with her.

Finally, I am drawn back to the seemingly simple title, “Feet in Socks.” There is something so very poignant about this; it speaks of their beginnings, of her just being “another neighborhood girl, just another feet in socks.” The power of story is one that even the simplest narrative, when told with truth, can produce something so much more than what appears on the page. To him, she was not just another feet in socks, and to us this story is not just another deathbed scene.

Reviewer's Bio:

Craig Terlson's fiction has appeared in Carve, Hobart, Bound Off, Smokelong Quarterly and others. He was named finalist in the Glimmer Train 2005 New Writers Award. Wigleaf named his story, "Night Birds," one of the top 50 online stories of 2007. He is currently working on two novels at the same time, which he is not sure is a good idea.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

Our Stories/Jo Page/Donald Capone/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:12:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Alexis Enrico Santi

Our Stories Literary Journal publishes some of the best short stories found on the web and engaging interviews with prize winning authors such as TC Boyle and Junot Díaz. Numerous stories have been short listed for storySouth award and published in the Dzanc Best of the Web. Central to Our Stories is a unique submission process, for every submission they receive year round, they provide personalized feedback; hence their credo "Don't just submit. Learn to receive." They are the sponsors of the Emerging Writer Award and the Richard Bausch short fiction prize and during these contests every writer whose story isn't chosen for publication receives a page by page analysis of their story. The journal was founded in 2006 by Alexis Enrico Santí who serves as editor in chief.

What struck me about this story was the slow methodical way that Jo Page begins her story and introduces a normal point of tension: the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. She then takes the story and patiently builds terror through tiny actions and dialogue. It's probably a more "print" story than I usually find these days and I attribute this to Page's training, having worked with one of the masters of prose George Garrett, who recently passed away. Simply put: it's a story that takes your breath away.

Nominated Short Story: "AAA" – Jo Page

Reviewed: by Donald Capone

"JANE’S CAR HAD STALLED OUT AT THE CREST OF A BLIND CURVE ON A WINDING, WOODED ROAD THIRTY MILES FROM THE RETREAT CENTER."

From the opening sentence, the reader is plopped smack down into Jane's predicament, which soon gets much worse. Author Jo Page's smooth, easy, no-nonsense writing style and dialogue grabs you and doesn't let go; you feel the tension almost immediately. In fact, I can't properly review this story without including spoilers. Seriously, major spoilers ahead. So my suggestion is to read the story first, then return to this review. Go ahead, I'll wait. I'll have a cup of tea in the meantime.

Welcome back. Now, as I was saying. From the moment good Samaritan Tom pulls up in his pick-up truck and offers a ride, red flags go up for both Jane and the reader. We're conditioned to be scared of strangers. Don't get in a car with strangers! Of course she gets in the truck, and of course Tom has intentions that aren't all pure. Otherwise there wouldn't be a conflict in the story—Jane would get to his mobile home, use his phone to call AAA, and wait for a tow truck. So we know what's coming. Still, you hope Tom doesn't go down the road that he seems intent on traveling.

Later, back at his trailer, when he asks Jane to take off her shirt, you're right there with her, and realize what you (and she) feared has now begun. You want Jane to make a break for it. Just run, get out of there, leg it back to her car if she has to. But she doesn't. She fears for her life, and goes along with his suggestion in the hope that it will end there, and then he'll take her back to her car as promised. But Tom keeps upping the ante. First her shirt, then her bra, then her pants. She's one step ahead of him at this point and takes her panties off without his asking. Here she does consider making a break for it, but doesn't think she'll make it, and worries it would anger him. Her survival instinct kicks in, as she tries to numb herself for what will come next.

We learn Jane and Tom have a similar recent history: they both have ex-spouses who cheated on them and left them for someone else. The sting of this is there for both characters, but how each deals with it is different. We don't know much of Jane's personal situation until later, but Page gives us Tom's up front: he's the father of two small children, his wife has left him for another man. Jane, along with the reader, wonders if Tom has picked up and attacked women before, or if this is the first time. We never learn this for sure, but rape clearly is his revenge on his wife, and women in general, even if he isn't aware of it. The rape scene itself is an uncomfortable read. Page doesn't let you off the hook here; she shows how it happens in detail, the dialogue between the characters, and how Jane feels immediately afterward.

Page offers us layered, complex characters—both the victim and the attacker. The rapist isn't a stereotypical violent angry brute. We get his story, too, and see how he probably does believe he's "normal" and is not doing anything to hurt Jane; in fact he believes he is gentle with her. Jane is more complex. She understands a crime is being committed against her, yet a part of her needs human touch (we later learn of her husband's infidelity), needs to be wanted, needs something, anything. But not this. Yet her body responds, and it feels good: "It felt good. It felt so good. Her hands reached for his ass, his back...This wasn’t rape. This was rape. She didn’t know." (I wonder if a male author could have gotten away with writing this without coming off as a cad.)

Later, Tom drives her back to her car, and she asks him to wait with her for the tow truck to arrive, and tries to make small talk with him. Jane then gets in the tow truck with the driver, and wonders if she is putting herself in the same situation as before. She actually thanks Tom for his help, her eyes tearing up as the truck pulls away and leaves Tom standing alone and sad on the side of the road. The Gentle Rapist. This is a case of accelerated Stockholm Syndrome here; the tow truck driver may be a new threat, but Tom is the devil she knows, who helped her on some level. She sighs and shuts her eyes, and lets "the rough ride and the vertigo of the curving roads swat her this way and that," her life a road of which she has no map.

This story will stick with its readers for a long time. It will for me; I still wish she had kicked him where it counts and made a run for it, though.

Reviewer's Bio:

Donald Capone's stories have appeared in Edgar Literary Magazine, Word Riot, Weekly Reader's READ magazine, Thieves Jargon, and Ampersand Review (forthcoming), as well as the anthologies See You Next Tuesday, Skive Quarterly 6, and Rebellion: New Voices of Fiction, which he also edited, and which was a finalist in the 2006 USA Book News awards. His comic novel, Into the Sunset, is available on Amazon and other places. He works in publishing as a designer of children's novelty books. He blogs here.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Fiction Weekly/Patricia O’Donnell/Mary Akers/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:30:00 +0000

Nominating editor: Jason Reynolds

Since launching in July of 2008, Fiction Weekly has published a steady stream of high caliber stories by established and emerging authors. Stories that first appeared in Fiction Weekly have been included in Sundress Publications’ 2008 Best of the Net Anthology and storySouth’s list of Notable Stories Published Online in 2008. We’ve been fortunate to publish award winning authors, and we’re equally proud that almost half of our contributors were first published in our pages.

Fiction Weekly has a simple and singular mission. We’re dedicated to offering readers one new and noteworthy story per week. Our editorial policy is also straightforward. We believe that stories should be judged by their ability to move readers, nothing more and nothing less. As such, we consider stories regardless of genre, and we give each submission the attention it deserves.

Due to the wide variety of fiction we publish, there’s no one story that sums up our tastes or style. That being said, Patricia O’Donnell’s “Gods for Sale” is one of our favorite pieces. The opening paragraph immediately calls to mind classic travel literature, and yet the story is unquestionably of our era. O’Donnell’s writing is layered and nuanced—thoroughly organic. Her eye for detail provides not only crisp imagery of unique settings and characters, but also insight into the story’s protagonist, her history, and her current and past dilemmas. “Gods for Sale” is a story worthy of multiple reads. As such, we’re proud to have O’Donnell’s work represent Fiction Weekly on Five Star Literary Stories.

Nominated Short Story: “Gods for Sale” - Patricia O'Donnell

Reviewed: by Mary Akers

Patricia O’Donnell’s short story, "Gods for Sale," takes a couple celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary into the strangeness of an African game preserve. As the story opens, they are discombobulated, flying into their final destination as “Americans, their eyes wide, still dazed after two days in Cape Town from hurtling to the other side of the world, from being upside down.” The wife, Elizabeth, stays unsettled as the trip unfolds. Although excited to visit the land she has long imagined, she finds herself uneasy with the racial and economic divide she senses there, face-to-face with the stark differences between the haves and the have-nots.

“The country of South Africa was a huge mystery to her, its squalid miles of tin shacks leaning together in the dust, donkeys pulling wrecked cars on flat wagons on the freeway, not far from elegant houses, Cape Dutch style, sweeping wineries, and estates behind high fences topped with electric wire. Everything was all jumbled together in this country. Here they were protected by sliding electronic gates from the locals, and by electrified fences from the animals, in a spacious enclosure where they could imagine they were close to nature.”

She is also beset by memories of the recent loss of her mother and an attraction to a handsome younger man she’d served on jury duty with. As the insomnia of a strange new place plagues her nights and the turmoil of her thoughts consumes her days, she turns a critical eye to her husband, reexamining their marital relationship in the light of the harsh African sun. When their rental vehicle malfunctions on a trip into the bush, and they end up stranded and alone as dark descends with the wild animals congregating, she realizes she’s been delivered the perfect point of decision.

The observations and sensory details in "Gods for Sale" are lush and perfect, drawing the reader simultaneously into the foreign world of Africa and the all too familiar world of the fickle human mind.

Reviewer's Bio:

Mary Akers is the author of Women Up On Blocks, a short story collection that explores the price women pay when they allow the roles of wife, mother, daughter or lover to define them. She co-authored the non-fiction book Radical Gratitude: And Other Life Lessons Learned in Siberia (Allen & Unwin, Australia) and also titled The Greatest Gift: Lessons Learned in Exile in Siberia (Simon & Schuster UK/Canada).

Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Fiddlehead, Ars Medica, Brevity and other journals. She has work in the anthologies The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change and Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform.

Akers also co-founded the Institute for Tropical Marine Ecology, a study abroad marine ecology program located in Roseau, Dominica. She enjoys snorkeling, hiking, backpacking, mountaineering, and snowshoeing. Although raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—which she will always call home—she currently lives in Western New York.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Guernica/E. C. Osondu/Clifford Garstang/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Sat, 09 May 2009 15:03:00 +0000

Nominating editor: Meakin Armstrong

Guernica is a magazine of art and ideas that author Howard Zinn called "an extraordinary bouquet of stories, poems, social commentary, and art." In its short time online, it has grown from one of the web's best-kept secrets to one of its most acclaimed new magazines. In 2009, Guernica was called a "great online literary magazine" by Esquire.

Last October we ran "Waiting" by E.C. Osondu, and even after all of these months, it's still a favorite of mine. The story of Africans in a refugee camp, I find it compelling from its first few lines:

"My name is Orlando Zaki. Orlando is taken from Orlando, Florida, which is what is written on the t-shirt given to me by the Red Cross. Zaki is the name of the town where I was found and from which I was brought to this refugee camp."

I love fiction such as "Waiting," because it isn't pretentious nor rife with literary trickery. It's simply a well-told story about a kind of life most of us couldn't even begin to imagine.

Nominated Short Story: "Waiting" - E.C. Osondu

Reviewed: by Clifford Garstang

“Waiting” is the story of Orlando Zaki, an African boy in a Red Cross camp for Displaced Persons. (The author, E.C. Osondu, is Nigerian, but the war-torn land of the story is not identified.) Camp life is a constant battle for food and water, and the children are waiting to be chosen for adoption by families abroad. Waiting is all there is to do. It’s a sad portrait of misery and unrequited hope that is, unfortunately, a little too familiar.

There are some wonderful passages here. We learn that Orlando’s name is derived partly from his t-shirt and partly from the village where he was found. The other children—Acapulco, Sexy, Paris, Lousy—all get their names in the same way. We also learn the history of the dogs in the camp. Once common and friendly, a period of food scarcity created a grisly conflict between humans and dogs, and now there are none. And the children are, today, waiting for a photographer to come. Having their pictures taken is an important step in the adoption process, and so the photographer’s arrival is eagerly awaited.

Orlando’s most important relationships are with his friend Acapulco, whose prospects are even bleaker than his own, and with Sister Nora. It is the Sister who has encouraged Orlando to write down his story, and also has provided him with books to read, including Waiting for Godot. She explains that the people in the book are waiting for God, but Orlando is waiting for water, for food, and for hope. There’s nothing else.

It is, perhaps, fitting that little happens in the story, as in the book Orlando reads. There is no specific conflict except for the daily struggle to survive. There is no real tension or plot. As the story comes to an end, Orlando and Acapulco do have to fight for a meager meal, but their small success offers no relief and no resolution. In the end, not a thing has changed, and Orlando is still waiting.

Reviewer's Bio:

Clifford Garstang’s story collection, In an Uncharted Country, will be published by Press 53 in September 2009.

He grew up in the Midwest and received a BA from Northwestern University. After serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea, he earned an MA in English and a JD, both from Indiana University, and practiced international law in Singapore, Chicago and Los Angeles with one of the largest U.S. law firms. Subsequently, he earned an MPA in International Development from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and worked for Harvard Law School as a legal reform consultant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. From 1996 to 2001, he was Senior Counsel for East Asia at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., where his work concentrated on China, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Garstang received an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in 2003 and has attended the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. He is a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and formerly served as the Fiction Assistant for Shenandoah: The Washington & Lee University Review.

Garstang’s work has appeared in Shenandoah, Whitefish Review, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Freight Stories/Andrew Roe/Meg Pokrass/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:03:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Andrew Scott

Freight Stories publishes new, emerging, and established writers, including many known to wider audiences: Robert Boswell, Patricia Henley, Mary Swan, Lee Martin, Cathy Day, Larry Watson, Gina Ochsner, Daniel Wallace, and more. One of our goals is to bring a rigorous editorial process to the endeavor, which is one reason we were the first journal to publish online the work of some of these established authors, but we also work to find new voices. Freight Stories—including in No. 5, which will “go live” in mid-May—publishes many emerging and debut authors, and we take pride in that.

Andrew Roe’s “Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night” features compelling characters in a difficult situation, and its narrative voice is relentlessly engaging. Roe’s story answers perfectly a request made in our submissions guidelines: “Fiction of all lengths and styles is welcome. We wish only that your work be driven by the exploration of the lives of believable, compelling characters, and that it help to illuminate, broaden, or in some way enrich its readers’ perspectives.”

Nominated Flash Fiction: “Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night” - Andrew Roe

Reviewed: by Meg Pokrass

The narrator of Andrew Roe's remarkable flash "Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night" lets it be known right away that she is perceptive, nervous, and trying to figure out where she and her boyfriend fit. She is vulnerable—a young person in a flawed world. The landscape is our present America; economically, and spiritually diseased. A Target store serves as Roe's stark, though colorful, setting.

The power of Roe's writing is in how unconsciously he approaches the reader with tiny physical details that add up to a feeling of these two young people being overwhelmed by forces that feel out of their control: mainly, temptation vs. limitation. The narrator and her boyfriend are coming off being drunk and/or high—having fun in the Target store, right at closing—the way kids will do at an adult's expense because they have each other to play around with.

Soon, we realize that Roe's narrator is getting nervous, knowing that the store is closing—though her boyfriend, Donny, is throwing whatever catches his eye into their cart, and can't seem to stop himself: "The lights in the store dim (hint, hint). I say to Donny, Let’s go, over here, I think." The narrator's emotional landscape begins to match the physical, in that the odds of buying and paying for all this unnecessary merchandise (and we can extrapolate this out a few years) are heavily stacked against them.

There is a moment in which Donny realizes his mistake and throws the items on the ground, "so he dumps everything on the floor . . . and we bail. Some minimum job wage slob will have to clean it all up. Not us." Here, we are shown that she is acutely aware of status, and that she does not intend to belong in that minimum-wage world. She sees herself and her boyfriend in an elevated light, as if they were a different species. Later, she judges makeup the checker is wearing, calls it "spooky" and "old ladyish." Here we recognize her tragic flaw—the inability to see people realistically.

Roe also shows us in slivers that Donny is emotionally immature, possibly reckless. We don't know why he is acting like such a destructive clown. She says, "But I’m not laughing as much now, because I’m starting to remember why we’re here." Roe's narrator bounces in and out of awareness of her own judgment, and of her own fragile identity apart from this boyfriend. To me, this is a delicious part of what makes this story memorable, and what makes Roe's characters real. They are complex and we worry for them. He's a master at showing us the internal struggle, and providing an uncomfortable feeling that something bad is brewing.

Reading the story, I could not tell if they are planning to steal something, or buy it—and I don't want to spoil it. The thing they are getting at Target feels important, and we are not told until late in the story what it is, though we are given hints: "It’s not like we’re buying condoms or porn, we don’t have to mask it with other stuff you know." They are young, though not children. These are seniors in high school, Donny is an all-state wrestler and "can lift a keg like a six-pack."

The story remains very grounded in physical details. The reader is trapped in the scene, like it or not. We don't know what is going to happen; why they are there, what will happen in the checkout line, and what exactly they are doing. This tension is part of the reading experience, and adds to the overall power of the piece.

The narrator's observation of the checker (the only other character in the piece) and her scripted words that she is too tired to even SAY are funny and unforgettable. Soon after they leave the store we are thrust into the deeper truth of why the narrator is so attached to her boyfriend—inseparable from him. We see that perhaps, she is losing her footing as a young person coming into her own. She is being stunted, and the way Roe later lets us in on the "why" is seamless.

Roe's writing is smooth, subtle, at times humorous—and the dialog is spot-on. There is not one moment that allows for escape from this little gem of a story. One feels, when reading this—superstores are like planets we don't completely trust. Kudos to Freight Stories for its amazing pick.

Reviewer's Bio:

Meg Pokrass lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter. Originally an actress, her flash fiction stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in 3AM, The Pedestal, Toronto Quarterly, Mud Luscious, Juked, Pindeldyboz, Smokelong Quarterly’s Fifth Anniversary Issue,Wigleaf, Elimae, Keyhole, Frigg,Wordriot, The Rose and Thorn, Thieves Jargon, Eclectica, Kitty Snacks, Rumble, and various upcoming anthologies of flash, including Dogs: Wet and Dry. Meg serves as a staff editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, and will be mentoring with Dzanc’s Creative Writing Sessions. Her blog, with prompts and writing exercises can be found here.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

Flash Fiction Online/David Tallerman/David Erlewine/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:12:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Jake Freivald

Flash Fiction Online is a monthly online flash-only magazine that launched in December 2007. As writers, our staff wanted to create a professional flash fiction market, as defined by groups like the SFWA and our own standards; as readers, we wanted to publish accessible and well-written stories. We care more about plot and character than genre. Flash tends to blur boundaries anyway, and our tastes vary widely enough that we publish a broad selection of genres and styles. We've featured Bruce Holland Rogers, who is now writing a column for us, along with other well-known authors such as Bruce McAllister and Jim Van Pelt, but we've also published several authors' very first stories.

I loved David Tallerman's "Strive to be Happy" from the moment I started reading. There's an intensity and discomfort in it, even though there's not a lot of physical action, and I kept getting these little surprises as the words flowed by. For me, the ultimate surprise was how well it resolved—not with all the loose ends tied up, mind you, but with the beginning of something new. It's great stuff all delivered in fewer than 900 words.

Nominated Flash Fiction: "Strive to be Happy" - David Tallerman

Reviewed by: David Erlewine

A story really works when it makes me sad that I didn’t write it. In this case, I will have to accept sharing the author’s first name. In about 800 words, David Tallerman makes me feel sorry for, and genuinely root for, a supremely unlikable narrator. The story involves the aforementioned jerk, who has come to despise and verbally abuse the woman living with him. It is never made clear whether the woman is a long-time girlfriend, fiancée, or wife. But they have been together for some time and whatever love he felt for her is gone.

Every morning he wakes up to find her hypnotized in front of her “dramatically italicised print of Max Ehrmann’s ‘Desiderata.’” The narrator hates the poem’s “cod wisdom,” deriding its “trite, hollow sentences” as “religion for atheists.” The poem “seemed to symbolize everything he despised about her; and the knowledge that those were the same things he’d once loved about her only worsened his rage.” The only words said aloud in the story are his insults as she stands in front of the poster. He knows he is being awful, but her acceptance of such behavior seems to encourage him.

One morning he destroys the poster, surprised by his “childlike ferocity.” Though the woman’s reaction isn’t stated, it appears she just stands by, watching. Then he heads to work. When he returns home, Tallerman ratchets up the tension with pitch-perfect pacing and details, describing "the bedroom in disarray, her clothes gone, her blue leather suitcase missing from its perch beneath the stairs." Tallerman nails the narrator’s response: “Instead, he felt literally deflated, as if one moment he were large and the next very small. She had left him. With that realization came sadness, too imprecise and short-lived to be the grief of loss. After that came relief.” Reading that passage, even now, elicits images from my own break-ups, the relief and sadness I felt in alternating waves.

The narrator finds, on the kitchen table, the poster’s torn fragments “spread like a patchwork quilt” and roughly put back in one piece, now covered in his lover’s notes. Next to the poem’s “As far as possible without surrender,” she has written, “‘No no no! Not anymore.’” This is wonderful, how Tallerman allows the woman’s voice to finally be heard, to explode in our ears.

Next to the patchwork quilt is an envelope. I shared the narrator’s fear that this “last communication” would be hateful, something that would plague him. Inside are the poem’s final lines: “Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.” In the story’s most haunting line, the narrator finds these words contain “some last vestige of love that he had somehow never managed to destroy.” I suspect this guy will mourn, learn, and presumably treat his next lover, and himself, better. I remain impressed that Tallerman got me to care so much about a character that I would avoid in real life. That may be this often-brilliant story’s greatest feat.

Another line from “Desiderata” (not quoted in the story) is to “speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant...” The lover's long-needed words smack the narrator with quiet and clear truth.

This story will stay lodged in my brain way down the line.

Reviewer's Bio:

David Erlewine's stories appear or soon will in about 70 places, including Elimae, Ghoti, In Posse Review, Insolent Rudder, Keyhole (web), Literal Latte, Necessary Fiction (So New Media), Pank, Pedestal, and Word Riot. He lives near Annapolis and writes stories on the train and when his family sleeps. Visit him at his sad little blog.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

PANK/Lauren Becker/Sue Haigh/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:28:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Roxane Gay

PANK is an annual print journal as well as a monthly online imprint. The word pank itself is a regional term from Michigan's Upper Peninsula where we live. If you ask three people what pank means, you'll get three different definitions, but the general consensus is that to pank is to pack or tamp something down. It is used with regard to mining (dynamite) or snow (panking it down to walk on because we get so damn much of the stuff). Where the magazine itself is concerned, editor Matt Seigel believes that PANK comes from the end of the road, the edge of things, a north shore, up country, a place of amalgamation, and unplumbed depths, where things are made and unmade, and unimagined futures are born. An ultima Thule, PANK – no soft pink hands here. We bear old scars, fresh scabs, callous, blood, and dirt. PANK is serene melancholy, spiritual longing, quirk, and anomaly. PANK is experimentation and improvisation. PANK inhabits contradiction.

More than anything we're interested in good writing. Everyone says that, but it bears repeating nonetheless. We particularly enjoy writing from people who take the time to read. You would think that goes without saying, but there are a surprising number of writers who don't seem to read anything but their own writing. We try to avoid them. Those writers make us sad. PANK publishes a lot of work that is cross genre, post genre, experimental and quirky. In our third issue, we had quite a few pieces that played in interesting ways with form. More traditional work also finds it way into our pages. We want words we will remember the next day and the next week and the next month. We've been extremely fortunate in getting a lot of work that meets that criterion.

I loved Lauren Becker's "You Should Know" the moment I first started reading it and I go back to it every few days because I love the way she uses language and the rational tone the narrator employs while relaying something that is irrational. The imagery of being held together imperfectly with rubber bands slays me. The piece is short but tight and there's something going on in every word in every sentence in every paragraph. It is, as a piece of writing, an embarrassment of riches. It's exactly the kind of writing that finds us.

Nominated Flash Fiction: "You Should Know" - Lauren Becker

Reviewed: by Sue Haigh

In this stunning little piece, Lauren Becker casually hands out useful advice on the first signs of madness (a pocket guide to self-diagnosis, as it were ), drawing her reader into her world, the one that lies on the other side of sanity. Look out, she says, with disarming kindness, this could be you.

In a mere 200 words, powerful metaphors – elastic bands stretched to breaking point, moving tectonic plates, bits not quite in place - are hinted at, as if seen from the edge of Becker’s eye, like the memory-traces of a strange dream.

The disturbing tragedy of her song-in-prose hides behind its stark, staccato delivery (not a comma in sight before the third paragraph). Emotions are kept strictly under wraps in case they should escape and blow her cover. The catalyst, a careless lover, is dismissed in a single sentence, as if too many words might destroy her again.

The subtle, insistent rhythm of Becker’s prose, the repetitive nature of her kind advice ("pay attention," "be careful," "see a doctor," "get a pill," "be on the lookout") speak eloquently of what threatens and binds us all – the human condition.

Reviewer's Bio:

Sue Haigh has spent most of her life on the north-east coast of Scotland, but now lives and writes deep underground in a cave-house in the Loire Valley in France.

She has written a collection of short stories, The Snow Lazarus, with support from the Scottish Book Trust. Stories from the collection have been published in print and online magazines and anthologies in Britain and America and have won a number of national and international awards and short-listings.

Stories from a Cave, her book of short stories for children, set in and around her house in France, will be published next year.

Sue studied psychology in Dundee and languages in Bristol, Paris and Cologne. She has worked as a teacher, university lecturer, clinical aromatherapist and counselor.

Sue is currently working on the final chapters of her novel, Missing Words, set in Germany and Scotland, and is also engaged in research for her next book, set in medieval Bruges.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

bearcreekfeed/Jac Jemc/Myra Sherman/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:11:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Colin Bassett

bearcreekfeed publishes full-length fiction online. The journal was launched in May 2008 with one of Kim Chinquee's longest stories ever published. Though there are obvious drawbacks, the longer story format does exist in many online venues, despite internet writing being dominated by shorter fiction and prose poetry. We wanted an online journal that published the kind of short stories one would usually only see in a print journal. bearcreekfeed also operates without issues; stories are published one at a time and without a specific schedule so that no concerns besides that of the nature and quality of the fiction dictate what we publish. Because of this the journal functions as a kind of style-oriented online fiction anthology. We also publish poetry e-books and print chapbooks, but the journal's home page is dedicated to putting both print-quality and print-length fiction online. As far as I know, there is no other journal with this goal.

We publish a specific style of writing that is hopefully apparent from what is on the site. When reading submissions I am looking for stories that are in line with this style; the majority of submissions are rejected very quickly for simply not fitting in. Also important are the opening paragraphs. I am always looking for an opening paragraph that is itself a kind of quality short-short. Likewise, though the stories are long, they need to maintain the swift quality of shorter fiction. I try not to apologize for length, but I do think people like stories that read quickly. This is actually the primary concern that prevents us from accepting a lot of otherwise desirable submissions. I am largely unconcerned with content; the style and manner of the writing are much more important. Similarly, we are not looking simply for "excellence" like so many journals stipulate in their guidelines. I don't care about "excellence" and will happily turn it down if it's not the kind of fiction I want to read.

Nominated Short Story: "The Tackiness of Souls" - Jac Jemc

Reviewed: by Myra Sherman

Jac Jemc’s short story, “The Tackiness of Souls,” immerses the reader into the world and mind of Minnie Fishman, a 31 year old “producer” at an ad agency. She is infatuated with Daniel, a “creator” at the agency, and sees him as her mirror image. Both of them are intense, clever and depressed. Both are narcissistic and insecure.

The story starts at an office party. Minnie is exhausted by the party and the need to be “on” all the time. She is ready to leave when she sees Daniel. Over the course of a very long night, they end up together at an all night coffee shop. By the time they part, Minnie realizes that being with someone who mirrors her flaws is worse than being alone.

Minnie is a great character. She is “burdened with a funny name by hippie parents.” She “isn’t a conventional bombshell and she doesn’t have the confidence which must support strange beauty.” A self-diagnosed manic-depressive who has decided she’s in a sad period, Minnie sees in “Daniel’s usual condition of misery,” her perfect match.

In addition to the interesting story and excellent writing, what makes this story memorable is the unusual structure. By alternating segments of third person present tense narrative with paragraphs that seem to be instructions to the reader, the author is able to intensify the reader’s emotional involvement with the previous segment.

For example, following a segment at the party where Daniel responds to Minnie’s overture with a shrug and a smirk:

"Think of it as metaphor for the future of this relationship; compare people who are smart to the ones who are hungry; remember that time your ex-boyfriend called you masochistic and you felt accomplished."

And after Minnie becomes disillusioned with Daniel:

"Think Aesop’s character foils; compare it to the tackiness of the concept of souls; remember the tension of condescension."

It was fascinating to watch the progression of Minnie’s time with Daniel and to share her experience. The push-pull of new relationships was beautifully drawn. The never saccharine, always smart tone was just right.

Reviewer's Bio:

Myra Sherman lives in Lake County, CA. Her fiction has appeared or will appear in: The Blotter Magazine, Fifth Wednesday Journal, 10,000 Tons of Black Ink (web), Workers Write-Tales from the Couch, 580 Split (web), Another Sky Press Horror Anthology, Thuglit (web), and others.

She has recently completed a collection of linked jail stories, and is now working on a novel.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Bartleby Snopes/Matthew Falk/Sarah Black/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:24:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Nate Tower

Bartleby Snopes is a magazine that publishes new works of fiction once per week. Each month we publish between 5 and 15 stories. At the end of the month the readers of the site vote for the story of the month. Every six months we collect our favorite stories in a magazine available for free as a .pdf download on the website. On January 5th we released our first issue of the semi-annual magazine format.

The first thing I look for is a story I haven't read or a character I have never met. Matthew Falk's story gave me both of those things. It seems that each month I receive several versions of the same old story with the same characters, only the stories have different titles and different authors. If the story doesn't feel new, or at least told in a fresh way, then it doesn't make it out of the slush pile. A few other things that virtually guarantee rejection:

1. Third person present tense. I am not sure when this movement began, but I don't understand it, and it just doesn't work 95% of the time.

2. Stories about struggling male-female relationships. This theme has been explored in virtually every way.

3. Unrealistic or boring dialogue.

4. Stories that try too hard to deliver a message. Tell the story and let the reader get the message.

I read every word of every story that is submitted. Sometimes a writer will surprise me, and I like that. I don't like stories that try to surprise me. It needs to happen naturally.

Nominated Flash Fiction: "Auspex Usurped" - Matthew Falk

Reviewed: by Sarah Black

Matthew Falk has written a gorgeous tale of a fallen god, a myth of such delicate and charming language it begs to be read aloud. The title, "Auspex Usurped," refers to the Roman name for an augur, or diviner, one who watches the birds for omens, and in the course of this story, the diviner is accidentally dethroned from his park bench.

What does a god need to be a god? He needs to believe in his godliness, and he needs worshipers. The old man had worshipers, a trail of unhappy souls offering five dollar bills in exchange for his magic words. But something happens, a stranger wanders in, and his belief in his own power, and place, collapses like a pyramid of tumbling acrobats. He trudges home in wet boots, defeated without battle.

Contrast the god with the human in the story, an old woman who spills her apples in the elevator, chases after them like a fool, but remains cheerful, remains human. When a god is made a fool, he feels only shame. A human has no pedestal to fall from.

The language makes "Auspex Usurped" a particular delight for me. The rollicking round words of the title sound like your mouth feels, licking an ice cream cone on a hot July afternoon; and then comes the list of the old man’s ailments, from arthritis to zoomorphism. Like a juggler tossing more and more balls into the air, Mr. Falk gives us twenty-five ailments in ABC order. I won’t tell you which letter is missing.

My son read this list out loud over his bacon pancake at Moon’s Diner this morning, and he was giggling by halitosis. I think you will be, too. Or like me, you’ll read this and be happy to be human, chasing after your spilled apples, eyes on the ground, and not the clouds.

Reviewer's Bio:

Sarah Black is a flash fiction writer living in Idaho. Her stories can be found in Flashquake, Everyday Fiction, Word Riot, Slow Trains, and several other online literary magazines. She has recently started Bannock Street Books, a micropress publishing illustrated flash fiction anthologies.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

Juked/Kyle Hemmings/Shellie Zacharia/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:46:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: J. W. Wang

Juked began in early 1999 as a small collective of friends publishing columns and op/ed pieces. Like most projects that have had some time to grow, where and who and what we are now is almost nothing like where and who and what we were ten years ago. Since around 2004, 2005, we’ve been publishing short fiction and poetry, along with the occasional non-fiction piece, or the occasional script/screenplay. Our stories have been anthologized in collections such as W. W. Norton’s Sudden Fiction series and Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web. We publish online continuously, and put together one print issue a year. I don’t know that we fit into any sort of convenient category or label—we’ve published some pretty off-the-cuff stuff, plenty of serious stuff, stories and poems that people would consider “experimental” as well as “traditional.” Every good story has a balanced blend of the expected and the unexpected, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and we particularly love stories that surprise us while giving us something we already know.

Kyle Hemmings’ “Is There Life on Mars?” for instance, tackles familiar themes: a failed marriage, death of a loved one, a disintegrating life in which dreams crumbled into harsh realities. Yet what Kyle manages to do is provide us with arresting images and all these emotionally hot moments that feel like they could only belong to Marjorie, and not something common to everyone else. Nothing in this story felt forced, which was very difficult to do, given the uniqueness of sundogs, the delicate and often artificially-weighted subject of dementia, a delicate soul mistreated by the world. On top of this, Kyle manages to deliver a whole life, an epic feel to Marjorie, through a scant two thousand words. In doing so, Kyle gave us a story that was something entirely new, while still operating in a familiar world.

Nominated Short Story: "Is There Life on Mars?" - Kyle Hemmings

Reviewed: by Shellie Zacharia

A sense of other-worldliness fills Kyle Hemmings’ thoughtful and lyrical short story, “Is There Life on Mars?” The story is divided into four strong vignettes that follow a character, Marjorie, from childhood through old age. In each section, we have an “alien” tie-in – though the story itself is not really about extraterrestrials. For me, it’s a story about identity and mystery and the human feeling of being elsewhere or alone in the presence of others.

In the opening section, Marjorie is a young girl sitting on her father’s shoulders surveying their land. Marjorie asks her father if they are Martians. She wonders this because her mother had just gotten a book that had strange words: UFO’s, crop circles, black holes. Her mother had told Marjorie that in Texas, people saw strange sightings or lights. Where’s Texas? Marjorie asks her father. “Someplace where you could get lost and they’d never find you,” he says. He also tells Marjorie that Mars is someplace cold – “A place where you’d float forever and forget your name.”

In the next section, which jumps years, Marjorie is with her boyfriend. They have just had sex. He asks her how it felt. “Like riding a comet. Like giving birth to a star,” she says. Something, a light, distracts Marjorie and she says it’s a space ship – “she wanted to believe in something amazing.”

In the third section of the story, Marjorie is an adult – a mother and a wife. We learn that Marjorie now lives in Dallas, Texas. We find out Marjorie’s son has distanced himself from her. Her husband has also, and Marjorie suspects affairs. When Marjorie learns that her son has been killed in a car accident, she doesn’t tell her husband right away. When she finally does, she says that some higher power “absconded” with their son. Marjorie tells her husband that if there was a god, he lived in a cold climate and very far away. “He was a lonely god, an alien, and needed humans for warmth.”

In the final section of the story, Marjorie is an old woman in a nursing home. When Marjorie is asked if she knows where she is, she says she is on Mars. The nurse, “the ghost,” answers that Marjorie is in Dallas. Marjorie wonders how she got there. “By spaceship?” she asks. When the nurse shows Marjorie a picture and asks if she recognizes the girl, Marjorie says that indeed it is her, but in someone else’s shoes. The story ends with Marjorie thinking about the stillness of the world . . . “the one she was on.”

What makes this a good story is the layering of images. Hemmings weaves references to aliens and sundogs and dust devils and black holes. Readers will notice the references to warmth and coldness that play throughout the sections. And then there are the recurrences of disconnects, isolation, and lost worlds. Each section of this story holds strong on its own and as a whole it’s a sad and beautifully-told tale.

Reviewer's Bio:

Shellie Zacharia teaches in Florida. Her stories have appeared in Hobart, Opium, Keyhole, The Pinch, Washington Square, Georgetown Review, Canteen, Juked, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Now Playing, is forthcoming from Keyhole Press. Find links to her work at her blog.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

The Linnet's Wings/Gary Cadwallader/Antonios Maltezos/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:30:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick

The Linnet's Wings is published from Co. Leitrim in the Irish Republic. Her editors are based in Ireland and the US. We're a small team, and we publish poetry, micro, flash, short stories and creative non-fiction with an occasional script and classic.

One of our main aims is to ensure the time that our visitors spend on our site is enjoyable. But when I started work on The Linnets Wings in 2007, all I was clear about was that we, as a team, wanted to create a literary ezine.

Our editors know that literature is about well-executed poetry and prose that shows the whys and wherefores of society through the eyes of the writer. Our authors are prepared to take a chance with vernacular and syntax as they develop their ideas to build their stories, and our poets understand their discipline. Both our poetry and prose writers know that words have the power to affect their world, their reader and their society, just as they have the power to curse or heal.

Although no one on the team at Linnet's Wings is paid, we believe that there must be an exchange of energy, a give and take in all Linnet's Wings transactions. So we spend many hours, reading, editing, sourcing and working with photographs and art as we slowly build our publication. In the first two months of our autumn issue, we received over 300,000 hits and hosted 4,700 visits.

As we enter 2009, we're in the process of designing our first print issue with the intent, after spring, to run a print issue each quarter alongside our ezine.

And while we're concentrating on creating something beautiful to showcase our contributors' work, we're putting in place modules, which will allow Linnet to fly successfully in whatever skies she chooses to wing her way through.

~~

The request was simple enough; I had to ask an editor to nominate a story from our archives and write a blurb about it. As our fiction editor Yvette was on a break, I decided to run with our flash and short story section to see what we had. We spent a week re-reading our archives, once again critiquing what we had already published in an effort to find a story that fit the bill. It was no small chore as I was constantly amazed at the talent that we have attracted since our inaugural issue in September 2007.

I was reading for voice, pace, style and characterization. Could I hear music in the soul of the story?

Cadwallader's "Thunderhead" kept making the cut. And it was a little like judging the finalist in American Idol, as each story had already made the grade as far as we were concerned. But we kept paring back since this was as much about who we are as an ezine as it was about our writers. And in the end it was "Thunderhead" that edged through.

From the first stroke of the conductor's baton, I could hear the reader's silence, the muse being stroked in the title. I was then drawn into his story.

From his first line I knew that I was reading about relationships. "How boring," one might say. Another relationship that hit the rocks as a writer wallows. But not in this case. For Cadwallader's narrator knew the score.

Within the body, we meet a bright man, a man willing to work at a relationship, to take the care required within the home. But a narrator who prefers to beat himself up with his choices by refusing to move on. His first paragraph ends with... "He loved her like some people love wounded birds."

And he starts the second by showing the texture of his past relationship with Lesley, building an image for his reader with a few strokes before he explores his unraveling relationship with Magnolia.

So who is this guy who waits for the woman to ring? Who is this guy who considers whether she may be suffering from hypomania as she puts her life in order and he goes home alone?

Is he a man who transfers his demons onto his partners and convinces himself that they have the problem?

Is he a man who'll move on to find another wounded bird to fix?

Or a man who knows better? or not?

All these questions bubbled up as I read the story. Towards the end, I mused as I sat on the porch with Jerry, watching the stars accept the inevitable.

After I finished the story, I thought about Jerry, Lesley and Magnolia. As I go about my business I'm sure to meet them in the street, in the restaurant or out walking. And maybe I felt just a little of their emotion trapped within myself, for "Thunderhead" is a story that transcends gender. What feeling will "Thunderhead" evoke from you?

To find out you'll have to read for yourself. "Thunderhead" is published to The Linnet's Wings Autumn Issue 2008 and it's a story written by a talented writer who developed his idea and spent many hours getting his presentation right.

Our thanks to T.J. Forrester and Five Star Literary Stories for their invitation, to Gary Cadwallader for giving me his permission to discuss his story in this forum, and to our readers and contributors for sharing in our small successes over the last year.

Nominated Flash Fiction: "Thunderhead" - Gary Cadwallader

Reviewed: by Antonios Maltezos

Gary Cadwallader wastes no time giving us a central point of focus, the clothing that’s scattered about. That clothing could just as easily have been the description of a hometown left behind but not really; a whiskered aunt who gossips too much because she’s just so bitter for never having found the right man; the bully we spied from across the street; the bicycle we rode like the wind; that family gathering – ‘nuff said; the weather. But this isn’t really weather-speak, is it? Well, it is if you figure we’ve all had to stoop to look under the bed at least once in our life for that errant sock that missed the laundry hamper. It’s more than just that, weather-speak, a span between neighbors that arcs to clear a fence, or the writer simply drawing us in with the familiar. This is a Cadwallader opening. This laundry speaks volumes. It’s clothing, “scattered everywhere,” a life dis-organized, without purpose or foresight, dirty and used because it been “balled up” and “tossed,” something a self-respecting person wouldn’t do. It’s even “yellowed by cat piss.” It’s dirty laundry with a story, out of the hamper and exposed. It’s the dirty laundry in the expression: don’t air your dirty laundry in public.

Magnolia is an impulsive woman, having left once before, her laundry strewn about then, as well. We can draw inferences about this woman. We can’t help it. Magnolia is like the junkie, or that alcoholic or impulsive gambler who comes around once every couple years for a bail-out, that one person you can never reach, never rein in like a wild horse even if your arms are strong enough and you have the right amount of caress in your whisper -- even if you have a stronger will than the beast. She’ll always be at arm's length from this narrator, who still wears his wedding band, who doesn’t mind collecting her clothes, washing them, packing them in boxes at her ready. If she’s ready. She, Magnolia, is of an ancient genus, according to Wikipedia, having evolved before bees appeared. Is that even possible? She’s been around forever, then, and if you’re a man, this could only mean one thing – the dreaded Eve! Always one step ahead of man. Even if this is a stretch, her sole purpose in life, as far as we can see at this point, is to torment our narrator until he can say, “Come on, cat. We’ve things to do.” Time to move on as if it had been up to her all along. She’s to blame. And this is the question that lingered for me as I traveled through the story. Was she really to blame for his life that seems to have stalled? That “he loved her like some people love wounded birds,” doesn’t explain it. That’s his reasoning, a way to feel useful, his self-worth intact as long as she’s a mess.

It’s this inter-dependence that’s so beautifully alluded to in the first paragraph, the laundry, which allows us to continue on as if we’ve been insiders all along. She may be searching for a purpose in life, but he’s the one who’s unwilling to take off that wedding band. It’s an unhealthy union, one that may have had a purpose but only as a stepping stone to get to the other side. But who’s more determined?

‘She'd shaved her entire body and when he stared, she said, “I made myself ready for you.”’

There’s desperation in this act, as there was the last two times she left without her clothing, leaving it where it lay as if some strange pulse bomb had gone off, killing the people but the things were unharmed. But he doesn’t get it, does he? “It was some kind of sexual ritual, he thought.” And that’s when this story becomes more complex than a simple retelling of the story of Eve and how, along with fire and sea, she was to be feared by man, and becomes about us and our reluctance to stare long and hard into the mirror lest we recognize who is staring back.

Maybe Magnolia’s dirty laundry scattered about was a testament of her resolve to recognize the unhealthiness in the relationship, to love herself first, everything else was secondary. A courageous act.

‘“Yeah, baby. I love you,” he said.’ This, after she’d informed him that she’d enrolled in school. Yeah, baby. I love you, as if he didn’t believe her new-found zest for life would lead anywhere. Yeah, baby. I love you, as if to say he’d be waiting, still not ready to go on with his own life if she wasn’t there. Yeah, baby. I love you -- what those words must sound like for a person trying to escape an unhealthy relationship.

We have to wish her well, at this point, as our thoughts turn to him and him alone, and how he will cope when it all finally sinks in. Is there a glimmer of hope in the lightning reflected on his wedding band? Or is it in his need for the outside, the open air? Is it the thunderhead like some great omen off in the distance? Or is it a combination of all of the above, as in life, when things slowly fall into place?

It is time to move on, after all, and I choose to believe his final words to the cat, which speak volumes like the laundry of the beginning. “Come on, cat. We’ve things to do.” We get the sense that when he’s ready, there will be much to do. There’s a thunderhead off in the distance, after all, the inevitable upheaval of a life turned inside out, though for the moment he chooses to focus on the clear sky overhead and the “hard lights” of the stars. That’s okay. As long as that thunderhead is looming large and dangerous, there’s hope.

Reviewer's Bio:

Antonios Maltezos is a member of the Canadian Writer's Collective, and a first reader for Vestal Review. He is presently working on a novel, A Train Runs Through Here, as well as several smaller projects, most notably raising his four daughters. He has stories both online and in print at such places as Per Contra, Dogzplot, Nighttrain, Mindprints, Temenos, Ink Pot, Pequin, Elimae, and Smokelong Quarterly.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

Barrelhouse/Mike Landweber/Barry Wade Simms/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:52:00 +0000

Nominating editors: Dave Housley and Joe Killiany

Barrelhouse is a literary magazine that, as we like to say, “bridges the gap between serious art and popular culture.” What does that mean? It means we publish literary fiction, poetry, and essays, pretty much like everybody else (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But we’ve also published poetry about giving Ed Asner a spongebath, a Very Special Patrick Swayze Section (issue 2), a dive bar section (issue 5), a roller derby section (issue 6), strange literary thingamagigs, essays on Magnum, P.I., The Hills, overuse of the word “rocks,” MTV, Godzilla, and other stuff. We also try to publish interviews with artists you wouldn’t normally see in literary magazines, like Ian MacKaye, Malcolm Gladwell, Chuck Klosterman, the Hold Steady, and the Drive by Truckers (before they were touring together, that is). We publish two print issues a year, and we aim for four online issues a year, as well.

I don’t know that there’s a typical Barrelhouse story—we’ve published everything from straight realism to stranger, more experimental prose poems to stories that border on science fiction—but if there’s one trait (I guess that’s the right word) common to most Barrelhouse stories it’s an effective, slightly offbeat take on a fairly common aspect of the world: breaking up with a spouse, losing a job, being a parent, paying the rent, etc. However, what makes these stories work, for us at least, is that they aren’t offbeat simply for the sake of being offbeat—they generally relate to their characters and situations in a way that serves to subtly get at something (an emotion, an idea, a desire, etc) that’s bigger and less defined than what the story seems to deal with on the surface. What’s more, most of the stories we publish tend to do all of this in a humane and funny way, which is an incredibly hard feat to pull off.

"Red," by Mike Landweber, which was published in our most recent online issue, is a really good example. At base, it’s a story about a guy who decides to leave the neighborhood. That’s about as common a situation as I can imagine; it can apply to people who grew up in suburbia, in a farm town, or in a city and got to wanting out. However, by adding the character in the car, the guy who simply stays put—for years—because of a broken red light, Mike gets at this larger notion of how and why people get stuck. Obviously, the idea of a guy living in his car for years waiting for a busted traffic signal to change is odd, but because Mike treats the situation so humanely and with such a high level of detail, we go along with it. Watching a guy live in his car for years for no good reason and having the main character decide to get on with his life as a result of that is a lot more interesting—and humane—than if he’d just grown up watching the unhappy life of the person who lived in the house across the street.

Nominated Short Story: “Red” - Mike Landweber

Reviewed: by Barry Wade Simms

According to Michael Landweber’s biographical note in Barrelhouse, in which this story appears, he is fond of titles with the word “Associate” in them. Well, this story of his is entitled “Red,” and that is even better, I think. Red was my favorite color when I was a kid. It is a color that has been known to boost eagerness, rouse vigor, and even promote activity and self-assurance. But the symbolism of color can vary, and I’m not sure those exact attributes aforementioned were what Landweber had in mind when he wrote “Red.”

Landweber chooses second person point-of-view, which I think can come across as bossy and gimmicky in some stories, but I believe works well for this story. “Red” opens with the speaker telling you, at the tender age of six, that you’re looking out of your room window of your small apartment onto the drab block below, filled with “rust brown” apartment buildings, just like your own, without verve. You live with Mama and her boyfriend Johnny, both somewhat indifferent and who allow you to have your own time and privacy in your room. Looking through the window you occupy yourself by staring at a broken traffic light that never changes; it remains red all the time and has been this way your entire life.

What follows are three interesting expository paragraphs explaining that before you were born there was a fire station next to your apartment that controlled the traffic light on your street, enabling the firefighters to turn the light green or red to stop traffic when they were called to put out a fire. That was the only purpose for the traffic light’s existence since the light is not located at an intersection and has no other purpose for controlling traffic.

You learn that the firefighters leave, the fire station is torn down, yet someone forgot to turn off the traffic light that forever remains red and the “magic switch” disappeared beneath the rubble of the razed fire station. When the firemen leave and the fire station is gone the people living on the block seem to have the fire sucked from them and in a way become listless, or more appropriately, frozen in their routines and their “rust brown” apartments on their “forgotten block”—a block that has no crime and is kept that way by the people who live on the block.

So, in place of the fire station another dreary apartment is built, yet the traffic light remains, obviously glowing red. But none of the locals heed its redness anymore and even drivers who become lost and pass through the block finally figure out that the light is broken and continue on, that is until one man, driving a “cherry red” sports car drives through.

When it comes to this particular man, the red light serves as a spider web of sorts, and he “believed in the light,” or he believes it would eventually change on its own. You watch him sit there and a connection develops between he and you. You were the first to see him.

One of the locals, Mr. Carter, leaves the sanctuary of his apartment and his routine of watching talk shows all day, and he tries to explain to the man that the red light will not change. The man ignores him and continues watching the red light. Mr. Carter is soon replaced by a group of unruly boys drumming on the man’s sports car, but the man’s attention cannot be broken away from the light.

That night the man remains in his car at the light. At three in the morning you take some food from your refrigerator to the man. You try to explain that the light will not change, but he says that the light is red, and he remains in his spot. The connection between you and the man grows, perhaps more than you are fully aware of at the time. The red light is symbolically holding everyone on the block, hostage. But this man believes that it will change. His showing up is the one event that takes place during your life that shows you how stagnate your community has become.

The next day the man is “claimed” by Annalise, a large, unattractive girl, who has a reputation of being promiscuous. She provides him with food, sex, and sponge baths. Over a course of weeks, then years, Annalise moves inside the car with the man.

The people living on the block become disinterested in the man and Annalise at the stoplight, even you, now a young adult become disinterested in the man and his car.

That is until shortly after turning eighteen your attention once again turns to the sports car at the forever red light and you notice how dilapidated it has become, how it has “faded to rust brown” and how “the chassis kissed the asphalt.” And this moment, twelve years later, again three in the morning, you find your own way, away from the block that has entrapped all the ones who live there, leaving the block and the man ensnared by the red beaming stoplight.

“Red” reads like a parable. It isn’t necessarily a simple story exemplifying a moral or even a warning for those who get too comfortable in their lives. At the expense of sounding sentimental, it is more a story of courage and faith. That’s what red means to me.

Reviewer's Bio:

Barry Wade Simms is a native East Tennesseean living among the hills of The Great Smoky Mountains. His short stories have appeared in Bat City Review, Whistling Shade, Maisonneve, Monday Night, and elsewhere. He is currently working on two short story collections.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

TQR/Michael John Grist/Melissa Palladino/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:04:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Theodore Rorschalk

Quoth Theodore Rorschalk:

As I’ve stated many times on TQR, and speaking before the UN General Assembly, "Internet-based publications with print mentalities shall not stand!" Furthermore, they are monoliths--monoliths without the benefit of Arthur C. Clarke’s fictitious construct’s ability to pass on technological enlightenment to their users--prolific on the Web as sand in the skies over the windswept Mojave; the rule, wherein TQR is the exception.

Dynamic where other Web publications are static, TQR challenges the notion that capital judgments must be kept sacred and unknowable as the obfuscatory term for tetragrammaton. TQR comes down off the bookshelf almost every day to give you bits and bytes and sometimes mouthfuls of information, whereas after their new capital gains are posted and the excitement dies (a week, give or take), the majority of e-zines go back up on the shelf to vet their capital in monastic obscurity and silence, while the fruits of their venture capitalists’ labor ripens, then rots from lack of cultivation and care.

What can I say about this work? The dialogue is salty as a damask whore. The world it takes place in has a disturbingly familiar foreignness that is never forced. It reverberates with verisimilitude without being portentous. You could call it allegorical biblical fantasy or literary tour de force. I call it simply a damn fine read.

Nominated Short Story: "Celibate Jayne the Hammerhand" - Michael John Grist

Reviewed: by Melissa Palladino

In a topsy-turvy world where the largest of whales is named after the smallest of birds, and the holiest of church organs is named after a South American metal band, a whaling captain with lethal silver hammerhands bashes his way out of the belly of a whale and reports that he has seen a human inside--a human who turns out to be a child with golden skin.

Michael John Grist successfully uses an “opposites” concept, slightly exotic dialog, and at times sing-songy description to draw the reader through to the main attraction--a powerful and moving story of redemption. This is a story where the humans are zoomorphized--Jayne’s crew resembles nothing less than a flock of raucous seagulls, and his first mate, “half-headed Elspeth,” bounces around the beached whale, her “big chin wagging with glee,” like an excited and intensely loyal dog. The children in town are “ratfer” children, and Jayne himself could be seen as a human version of a hammerhead shark--a lethal loner, in spite of the devotion of his crew.

The named in the story are not whom you would expect. The crew except for Elspeth is anonymous, the townspeople are anonymous, and perhaps most tellingly, the wife and son Jayne left behind are simply “the lass and the lad.” The named are the whales, in a flood of identification when Jayne finds himself again out at sea--Bride’s and Pygmy Rights, Humpbacks, Left Blues, Mesoplodonts, Brontochal Giants, Pterodal Fins and more.

This emphasis on the named importance of the whales gives the reader his or her first clue about where this story is going, because up until this point the plot tension has been whether or not the crew could strip the blubber from the whale, melt it down, barrel and ship it to the city before the coming storm breaks around them--and the overriding concern of Jayne and Elspeth to identify and get the child out of the dead whale before this happens.

Who is the child? The manifest lists him as Damaris, the son of the first mate on the ironically named shipwrecked “Salubrious,” and he has been inside the whale for five years. But he is also much more than that, as Jayne finds out when he attempts to rescue him from the dead whale that has been washed back out to sea and is sinking into the deep. For to Jayne’s one whale-calling note, Damaris can sing a symphony, and it’s to this symphony that all the whales respond--including the biggest whale Jayne has ever seen, the behemothic Ptarmigan.

The Golden Child, in legend, is a magical child foretold to save the people of the land from evil. In this story, he is a bridge between two species, and I would argue that he’s trying to save both species from evil--the whales from being mindlessly slaughtered, and the humans from the psychic consequences of murder. Jayne finally understands while listening to their song that the creatures he has hunted and brutally destroyed are capable of profound grief--and further, that the very whale giving him life-saving succor is the mother of the whale he has just killed and dismantled. And on All Hallows eve, when the dead revisit the mortal world, the body of this mother’s child floats back up to the surface so Jayne can view it through the lens of his new understanding.

Our Jayne is celibate because he has already harmed his own child through his continuous absence--an unnecessary absence, as we discover, because he has money to spare from his whaling success. He refuses Elspeth’s tender advances because he will not get her with child, only to leave them behind on shore--her suggestion that she whale with child horrifies him. His self-induced isolation is part penance, part protective measure, and his realization that he has not only harmed but murdered a child, albeit of another species, drives him to do what he can to atone.

Jayne returns to the town, and breaks into his own warehouse. In a long evening that stretches into night, he empties barrel after barrel of the newly acquired whale oil off the docks and into the ocean. Jayne here resembles nothing less than Jesus going through the stations of the cross--each quarter-ton barrel he carries to the dock cuts his skin and by the time he carries his thirtieth barrel to the water’s edge he is leaving a trail of blood behind him. His crew, like the disciples of Jesus, are at first amazed to see him, then angry, and finally leave him, disgusted by his actions. Elspeth, like Veronica, offers him comfort by wiping his face with a white towel.

Grist makes use of italics to shift Jayne’s midnight labor, somewhere between the 30th and the 40th barrel, into the realm of folklore, and we understand that this is now a story that has been passed down from generation to generation in a society that has moved beyond whaling. This explains both the embroidered language (“the char-houses and damask docks” / “the roar of their moany groany ruck”) and the graphic descriptions of violence--not too different from our own Brothers Grimm.

Grist is a British/American writer living in Japan--one of the few countries that persists in pursuing whaling as an industry. It is easy to be outraged by their actions--but an honest citizen of just about any country can find similar research, trade or industrial policies involving creatures deemed to be just as intelligent, and with as complex an emotional life as whales.

Note: "Celibate Jayne the Hammerhand" is more fun than Ulysses to puzzle out. What follows are details that aren’t quite relevant to the storyline, but add to the richness of the tale.

The crew isn’t named--with the notable exception of Shume and Fralla, who are sent to back to the city for more men.

Shume and Fralla are the principle ingredients in an “eau de vie” liquor made by Serbo-Croatian nuns--shume being pine needles and fralla being mushrooms. Fralla is also the name of a Swedish breakfast sandwich. So Grist is not only comparing the crew to seagulls, he individualizes two of them into something even lesser--a pine needle and a mushroom (or a breakfast sandwich, take your pick).

The meaning of Elspeth is “consecrated to God.” The meaning of Jayne is “God is gracious.” Damaris means “to tame, gentle.”

Fans of Tolkien might think of another possible source for “Hammerhand”--the legendary Helm Hammerhand after which Helm’s Deep was named. According to the story, the king was so named because he killed a rival with a single blow of his fist--and when forces were brought against him he would steal out under cover of winter storms, enter the enemy camps, and kill soldiers with his bare hands.

As mentioned at the top of the review, Grammaton (a church/organ in Grist’s story) is a heavy metal band in real life. Here is a quote from their website: “There’s a thousand of ways to call the Devil, and one of them is called Grammaton.”

Reviewer's Bio:

Melissa Palladino holds degrees from Colby College and Maine College of Art, and lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Night Train, Inkwell, Boston Literary Magazine, Vocabula, elimae, and elsewhere. Writers working on craft can find her show with Randall Brown on beginnings and endings online at The Writing Show. Melissa is employed as a private chef in Beverly Farms and blogs about her obsession with cooking all 1,300 recipes in The Gourmet Cookbook.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Snowvigate/Kim Chinquee/Paula Bomer/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:56:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Doug Martin

Snowvigate was started on Mother’s Day 2006 as an attempt to join the online community of writers. Now it has branched out into a press. Entitled Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years, our first printed book is due out in January 2009, and includes 112 writers from 55 online journals.

We are interested in publishing poetry, flash fiction and drama, non-fiction, short essays on critical theory, prosody, and poetics. We want to see genres coming together and huddling in a blizzard to keep warm. We want to see verbs slapping the hell out of lazy nouns. We want work that soothes the bones like calcium. We want to see God's syntax in snow.

“Down the Road,” by Kim Chinquee, which appeared in our first issue, Spring 2006, was perfect for Snowvigate. In the flash, Kim’s speaker is an odd bird of a person, dealing with the daily surrealism of someone on the edge. Also, I think this story is much different than most of Chinquee’s work. As with any of Kim's work, we were more than happy to snap it up and post in our debut issue.

Nominated Flash Fiction: “Down the Road” - Kim Chinquee

Reviewed: by Paula Bomer

Language is an ever evolving tool, and like anything–a hammer, for instance–it can be used for many things. Chinquee’s use of dream-like imagery and surrealistic visions are grounded in a few ways: firstly, there are linear motions to her events; secondly, she often says things plainly and simply as in; “My dad got schizophrenic and my mom left him.” (In my mind, this is the most important sentence in this 500 word flash). But most refreshingly, she uses disturbing imagery–a cow in a trunk, vomit, humans so enormous one can’t see past them–to deepen the very strong emotional core to the story. This is no small feat, when often explorations in language seem to be used to obfuscate emotional centers, rather than strengthen them, in contemporary writing.

Chinquee’s first person narrator also contrasts nicely with the fantasy elements in that a first person account often feels “closer” to a reader. It is this constant juxtaposing of the various uses of language–to pull in or push away a reader–that are one of the pleasures of reading this story. And in such a short time, Chinquee covers quite a bit of ground and says so much. The sadness of this woman’s life–her schizophrenic dad, some shady men when she was younger, the loss of the farm, where she repeats “they sold everything” three times–stand out in relief against the bits of innocence and joy, as in, when talking of her sister; “ she and I would run in snow, then fall to make angels.” And it is to a similar image that she returns for a beautiful ending, an ending with hope, and one that shows the narrator has moved on as she brings her past with her.

Reviewer's Bio:

Paula Bomer grew up in South Bend, Indiana and now lives in New York. Impetus Press will publish her collection of stories, BABY, in 2009. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Mississippi Review, Fiction, Open City, Storyglossia, Word Riot, juked, Sub-Lit, The First City Review, X: The Erotic Treasury (Chronicle Books), Night Train and elsewhere. You can find links to her work or reach her at http://www.paulabomer.com.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

Agni/Steinur Bell/Jessica Lipnack/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:46:00 +0000

Nominating Editors: Susan Muensterman and Alexandra Goldstein.

We think of AGNI as a forum for the “cultural conversation” of literature, but it’s up to writers to shape that conversation. We don’t choose work for its subject or setting or themes, but for its vibrancy, freshness, and honesty. We look for language that sings in a new key, that doesn’t settle for notes we’ve heard a million times before. Newness in literature is contextual, though, and a move into less-familiar territory may rely on forgotten roots, a recalling of little-heard notes from some earlier song — Cormac McCarthy comes to mind, in his reliance on Biblical cadences and language. How a subject is handled, how a story is told — these are of paramount importance. We look for obliqueness rather than straight-on journalistic telling, because nobody’s deepest experience of the world, it seems to us, lacks the curve of idiosyncrasy. PEN American Center, in awarding Founding Editor Askold Melnyczuk its lifetime achievement award for magazine editing, said, "Among readers around the world, AGNI is known for publishing important new writers early in their careers. . . . AGNI has become one of America's, and the world's, most significant literary journals" and "a beacon of international literary culture." Ha Jin (1999 National Book Award), Jhumpa Lahiri (2000 Pulitzer Prize), and Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted) are but a few who appeared in our pages first or early on, alongside already famous names such as David Foster Wallace, Sharon Olds, and Seamus Heaney. Housed at Boston University and edited since 2003 by essayist and literary critic Sven Birkerts, AGNI publishes two 240-page issues annually. AGNI Online an electronic extension of the print magazine, features biweekly postings of new Web-only fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews.

We’ve chosen Steinur Bell’s “The Whale Hunter” for its particular combination of elements – a dull office atmosphere, an illicit affair, and an exotic adventure on the Faroe Islands. Bell lures us with the voice of his narrator, a wildly imaginative man who tells his coworkers a story he heard from an old college friend, claiming it as his own. What results is writing that entertains, a story that is excellently paced, and an adventure that the reader gladly joins in on, willing to follow wherever Bell leads.

Nominated Short Story: "The Whale Hunter" - Steinur Bell

Reviewed: by Jessica Lipnack

Steinur Bell’s literary identity theft is a triple knit.

“The Whale Hunter” leads with a description of puffin hunting in the Faroe Islands. Nonfiction, it appears, especially after the second-paragraph reference to Google that lacks a link. I google anyway and find a photo similar to the one the narrator references: a teenage boy rappels a cliff, a shawl of dead puffins draped around his neck.

Three paragraphs in, the principal fiction begins. The unnamed narrator names the puffin-hunter Olaf, speculates about his “sturdy” wife. Olaf’s image becomes the narrator’s desktop picture even as he tells us “I was not verifying my identity at work as a rugged adventurer.”

The complication arrives in paragraph four: The narrator has never visited the Faroe Islands but his friend Eric has. Herein the identity heist, the second strand. Eric’s brief visit to the Danish Islands in the northern seas becomes the narrator’s fabricated victory. A few pages later, he tells “his” story to his coworkers (unnamed industry, unnamed company, unnamed city) during a dull meeting in a conference room: In the Faroe village of Vestmanna, he once joined the Whale Hunters, slicing arteries, feasting on blubber, his socks bloodied.

The third twist of the yarn is the “affair,” which comes to the narrator’s office cube in the person of “the prize of the team,” self-involved Trish with “breasts like acorns.” Theirs is an affair rather than a simple hook-up because they’re both married, he to Jean, who tells him “You better in a Norman Rockwell,” she to Glen, perpetually watching the Sonics.

So the three strands: the journalistic introduction, the fiction with its story-within-the-story, and the obligatory office “romance.”

There are some nice touches here: Officemate “Randy” is in charge of the narrator’s “professional development.” He tells his story in Hera, the goddess of women and marriage. The Faroe Islands are, according to legend, “God’s twisted thumbnails.” “The whale’s skin…glimmering like obsidian in the sunlight.” When he tells his lie to his coworkers, he’s so nervous that his hands are “alive in my lap like kittens.” They tryst at the Sleep Here Motor In, whose neon blares Vacancy as they leave.

Need I add that I googled the author? Steinur Bell (how many can there be?) is/was in a band called The Humanoids. Multiple identities here too.

Reviewer's Bio:

Jessica Lipnack is a writer whose non-fiction work has led to a career as a management consultant (she is CEO of NetAge, a Boston based consultancy). She is the co-author, with Jeff Stamps, of six non-fiction books, including Virtual Teams, Networking, and The Age of the Network. She has written for, among others, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, Harvard Business Review, The Industry Standard, Ars Medica, Global City Review, Mothering, and The Futurist. She was recently interviewed by Writers in Profile. Jessica lives in Massachusetts with her husband. When not writing, she is knitting, gardening, doing yoga, and wasting time online. For more information, visit the NetAge website, and Endless Knots, her blog.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

decomP/Patrick Kelling/Randall Brown/ Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:07:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Jason Jordan

decomP is an online literary magazine that is updated monthly. We have been in existence since April 2004 and we were originally called Decomposition Magazine. We publish prose, poetry, art, and solicited book reviews. Recently we've begun incorporating author interviews, too.

What I look for in a story when I'm reading decomP submissions is an intriguing title and gripping first sentence hook. My attention span is much shorter when I'm reading online, so if I'm interested enough to make it through a short story in one sitting—aside from flash, of course—then I know the writer's done his job. The only two reasons I ever finish reading a submission from start to finish are because either I want to find out what happens, or I like the protagonist(s) so much that I'm willing to follow them anywhere, if not both.

After reading Patrick Kelling's "Propping Frisco" for the first time, I knew I had a great story on my hands from someone I'd never read before. The title made me curious, as well as the opening line, and while I was first annoyed with the protagonist's OCD tendencies like counting numbers of steps, I quickly realized—nearly in the same thought—that they're necessary character traits. After all, a prop guy who's great at what he does seems like he'd have to obsess over specific details, and there are plenty of those in Kelling's decomP debut.

Nominated Short Story: "Propping Frisco" - Patrick Kelling

Review: by Randall Brown

"Authenticity," Patrick Kelling's narrator tells us in "Popping Frisco" from decomP, "is a serious business." Fortunately, for us, Kelling has fun with this idea, as his narrator struggles to ensure the correctness of the circa 1880 details on the set of a show populated by "those roistered bastards" who don’t quite share his desire to get it right.

The prop room, the costumes, the actors in and out of character—all these Kelling puts to clever use. Kelling's own authentic use of details—as in his description of the transformation of apple juice into moonshine, a miracle many of us might pray for—adds to the fun and originality of this piece. Each moment and each aspect of the story has a charged, urgent freshness and weight. Kelling manages to keep his tale light without being lightweight, no easy feat to pull off.

The arrival of a bottle that has the characteristics of an 1886 glass rather than of one in 1876 sets the narrative in motion. Working to cover this error he's convinced someone will discover, the narrator tells us, "If Paula held [this bottle] in a certain way, no one would notice as she broke it over some extra's head. I would tell her to watch this detail, to hold it so that the seam faced away from the cameras. But she wouldn't listen; she never did." Getting people to listen and to notice, to even care a little, becomes the narrator's impossible challenge, as he goes from prop room to set, down the streets of a Frisco long since vanished.

That bottle's seam might symbolize the fragile existence of one so dedicated to authenticity in a world that lacks the same interest and commitment. Everything and everyone around him threatens the illusion he's hoping to create, at the same time they themselves lack some necessary substance, creating what the narrator considers to be a universe full of "out of place pieces of shit." And what of our narrator, the hero of this tale, who confronts the show's star Christie in her "baby blue, long polonaise bodice" and tries to get her to see all that's being lost along with her pearl-handled Colt Bisleys? Each step takes him closer to that revelatory moment awaiting him at the end.

Kelling's mix of authenticity and comedy, along with the narrator's attempts to hold his shit together, make for one rip-roarin' tale, one that had this reader bustin' at the seams throughout.

Reviewer's Bio:

Randall Brown holds an MFA from Vermont College. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, Saint Ann's Review, Evansville Review, Laurel Review, Dalhousie Review, upstreet, and others. He is the author of the award-winning collection Mad to Live (Flume Press 2008) and on-staff at Smokelong Quarterly.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

storySouth/John Marshall Daniel/Russell Bittner/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:03:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Jason Sanford

storySouth is an online literary journal focusing on writings from the New South. The journal has been published quarterly since 2001 and hosts the annual Million Writers Award for best online short fiction.

"Johnny Cash Beset by Darkness" by John Marshall Daniel is an amazing piece of fiction. Without giving too much away, the story definitely fits into our journal's mission since the tale features a lush Southern setting and disturbing traveling sideshow, making this a 21st century echo of the classic Southern Gothic Fiction genre. But where a lesser story would have dog-paddled in the warm waters of these familiar story-telling cliches, this tale dives deep into the cold, fresh waters of Daniel's unique writing voice. The result is a classic tale which stays with the reader. I can't complement storySouth's fiction editor Scott Yarbrough enough for selecting this perfect story.

Nominated Short Story: "Johnny Cash Beset by Darkness" - John Marshall Daniel

Review: by Russell Bittner

“Gaze upon the spectacle! The former love of her life, covered in fake hair and tattered clothes. Still life with piss bucket.”

Would it be fair to call this a coming-of-age story? Not really. Gordon, aka the “Beastman,” is well beyond adolescence, beyond the age of consent, beyond any age in which much of anything really matters anymore.

Gordon is a carny, a sideshow spectacle, or—as he explains to his ex when she and serendipity contrive to put her under the same tent with him—a showman. (“‘Carny,’” he insists, “is an outdated pejorative.”) And the more politically correct “showman” is exactly what he’ll persist in being right up until his ex shames him into seeing his life for what it is—at which point, he’ll walk out.

There’s ample opportunity for pathos in this story, but Daniel takes the high road from start to finish. His prose never rises above (or sinks below) a quiet intensity. At the same time, he demonstrates a mastery of carnival jargon, mores and habits.

If carnival lore is your thing, if the smell of cotton candy, hotdogs and sour relish are so thick in your blood you can’t ever piss ‘em out, you’ll love this story. Not many of us get a chance to peek behind the curtain of a carnival sideshow. Daniel takes us past the curtain and deep into the soul of one of its bit players—and then leaves us there to contemplate “a still life with piss bucket.”

Reviewer's Bio:

Russell lives in Brooklyn, New York. His poems have been published on paper by: The American Dissident; The Blind Man’s Rainbow; The Lyric; The Barbaric Yawp; The International Journal of Erotica; Wicked Hollow; Æsthetica; and The Raintown Review – which nominated one of his poems for a Pushcart Prize in November of ‘07. Another poem will be published once again in The Lyric (Winter, ‘08 edition).

On-line, his poetry can be found at: Quintessence; ken*again; SpillwayReview; Erotica Readers and Writers; EdificeWrecked; GirlsWithInsurance; ThievesJargon; SalomeMagazine; LauraHird; MadHattersReview; 3a.m.; Dogmatika; Mindfire; ALongStoryShort; OpiumMagazine; SouthernHum; JustusRoux; DifferentVoices; VoidMagazine; PWReview; Zygote in my Coffee; ALittlePoetry; PlumBiscuit (a journal of the New York Writers Guild); TheCentrifugalEye and The Linnet's Wings. Two additional poems will appear at Per Contra/”Currents” in the winter of ’08, and three will be published in The Ranfurly Review in March, ’09.

On paper, he has published stories with The Edgar Literary Magazine; The International Journal of Erotica; Beyond Centauri; and SwillMagazine. One of his stories was published by St. Martin’s Press in May of ‘07 in an anthology titled Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen. An additional story will be published by Sein und Werden in September, ‘08.

In the dot.com world, his prose can be found at: DeadMule; writeThis; GirlsWithInsurance; SkiveMagazine; Bluefood; ThievesJargon; Quintessence; MannequinEnvy; UndergroundVoices; Pindeldyboz; Hackwriters; 10,000 Monkeys; DeadDrunkDublin; ALongStoryShort; SouthernHum; SuffolkPunch; VoidMagazine; VerbSap; Per Contra; the Canadian Writers Collective; SlipTongue; The Angler; and the uncommon Yankeepotroast.org. The story in Per Contra earned him a Pushcart Prize nomination in November of ‘06.

Russell completed his first novel, Trompe-l’oeil, in September of 2004, the first chapter of which appeared in Snow Monkey in February, 2007. (The same first chapter will appear electronically at The Rose & Thorn.com in the fourth quarter of 2008.) He then completed a novella-length memoir, Girl from Baku, in June of 2005, the first six chapters of which currently reside at DeadDrunkDublin.com. The entire memoir was also serialized at Dogmatika.com (September, ‘06 through February, ‘07). He is presently at work on two additional novels: Gigolo, Gigolina and My Cradle, My Crucible.

He can most easily be reached at RRBrklyn@aol.com.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Wigleaf/Barry Graham/Mary Lynn Reed/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:24:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Scott Garson

Wigleaf publishes short stuff – stories under 1000 words. We run a new story every few days for nine months of the year; over the summer we put up our award annual, the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions of the year (Chad Simpson served as our first Selecting Editor and came up with a fantastic and super-diverse list).

So—short stuff. 'Flash'? The term is useful because people know it, but I'm not a big fan: in the metaphor I sense something too close to a prescribed aesthetic—and if there's anything that has characterized Wigleaf in its first year, it's probably a moving away from prescribed aesthetic.

I remember reading something in a fiction-writing text I once assigned. Though you may have the most dazzling ideas in the world, its author argued, readers won't read them unless you have a strong plot. Something like that. I've come to see Wigleaf as a refuge from this type of thinking. Story is important, but there's a lot more than one kind of story, and a lot more than one way to tell stories. Nothing really unites the very diverse group of writers who've been generous enough to share their work with us—except maybe this: they seem to me to be doing just what they want to do, and only what they want to do. If they're following rules, they're of their own making.

I won't say much about Barry Graham's "This Story Is Not about Ham and Cheese Sandwiches," because I'd like to leave things wide open for the review. I will say this: many, many readers have expressed enthusiasm for this story, admiration of it. As a reader, I'm right there with them.

Nominated Flash Fiction: "This Story Is Not about Ham and Cheese Sandwiches" - Barry Graham

Review: by Mary Lynn Reed

From the very title of this story, the reader is challenged to dust off that secret decoder ring and answer the question that is laced into the fabric of every well-chosen image in this simply-stated short fiction. The title tells us this story is not about ham and cheese sandwiches. By the end of the first paragraph we know it is not about Ms. Pac-Man and ham and cheese sandwiches. So, dear reader, what is it about?

Great short stories both entice and reveal from the very first sentence. "Not About Ham and Cheese Sandwiches" begins: "I woke up because my lips were dry." This is a great example of an opening line working overtime. The protagonist is parched, yearning for hydration. But, two sentences later: "No, that's not why. I woke up because someone rang the doorbell." Soon, everything is suspicious. The protagonist is slightly paranoid, having fallen asleep playing Ms. Pac-Man, and "The game was paused but the red ghost was still moving, still trying to catch me and eat my soul." My secret decoder ring says that may be the most important line in the story.

And then the leading lady appears, making our hero those ham and cheese sandwiches, eating all of his pretzels. She wants rum and Coke, but he can only provide half of the cocktail. The Coke half. She's cold and wants a blanket. He tells her to drink more rum (which he doesn't have). In the morning she makes him scrambled eggs and toast. He can't stomach it and prefers a bowl of Cookie Crisp. What she gives, he doesn't want. What she needs, he doesn't have. And in a remarkably deft maneuver, the author slips us the clue: "All of this took thirty seconds or ten minutes or two and a half years."

This story is not about Ms. Pac-Man and ham and cheese sandwiches. It is laced with symbolism and fresh metaphor and it is not happening in real-time. But with its clipped, achingly real dialogue, and its effortless and vivid description, it achieves a relentless undercurrent of: "Look closer: there is more." And the reader is happy to stay, decoding, well beyond the final bang of the screen door "back and forth against the white chair on the front porch."

Reviewer's Bio:

Mary Lynn Reed's fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin, Karamu, Happy, Temenos, Smokelong Quarterly, and many other places; she has stories forthcoming in Per Contra and Night Train. She is currently writing a novel about a transgendered teenage triathlete. She lives in Maryland, near Washington, D.C.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

Memorious/Evan Lavender-Smith/Steven J. McDermott/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:17:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Jessica Murphy

Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction is an online journal that seeks to publish the highest quality literature from both established and emerging writers. Memorious will be celebrating its fifth anniversary with our next issue.

Work first published in Memorious has been included in the Best of the Net, and, most recently, Memorious has two poems and one story included in Best of the Web 2008, which will be released by Dzanc Books in July. Our contributors have been recipients of the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best American Short Stories, and other literary prizes. Among our poets are Bob Hicok, Major Jackson, Steven Cramer, Gail Mazur, Thom Gunn, and a previously unpublished interview with Pablo Neruda. Among our fiction writers are Steve Almond, Paul Yoon, Benjamin Percy, Robin Lippincott, Ted Weesner, Jr., and interviews with Don Lee and Jim Shepard.

I nominate Evan Lavender-Smith's story, "At the Core," from Memorious 9, for many reasons. It is a wonderfully imaginative story, and I was struck both by Lavender-Smith’s lapidary prose and by the convincing way he rendered the child’s point of view. Emily Dickinson advises us to “tell it slant,” and this story does just this. By looking closely at the child narrator’s reverence for each of the possessions that he buries in his backyard near “the Earth’s mantle,” the author invites the reader to contemplate the much larger mysteries of both loss and healing. “At the Core” was a story that lingered with me after I'd first read it, and it lingers with me still.

Nominated Short Story: "At the Core" - Evan Lavender-Smith

Review: by Steven J. McDermott

As with the best of stories, Evan Lavender-Smith's "At the Core" reveals more and grows in power with repeated readings. The prose is concrete, seemingly realistic in style, yet gives way to the fantastical and the metaphoric. A story about desire and how the attempt to contain it expands until the containment itself is more a controlling force than the desires combated. Metaphorically a coming of age story: from nine to twelve; from toys to books to a person (expressed via her handwritten marginalia in the books). Father bonding, too.

Although the physical burying of the objects is an obvious a correlative of repression, Lavender-Smith deftly links it to the narrator's maturation. Initially able to only dig down one and a half feet (loved the way that is repeated as an incantation), as he grows older and stronger he's able to dig five and three-quarter feet down, down until the spade melts, down to the metaphorical source of power at the Earth's center.

"At the Core" is a wonderful story with old-school stylings that uses symbolism and metaphor to comment freshly on a core transformative experience.

Reviewer's Bio:

Steven J. McDermott's work has appeared in more than twenty online and print journals. He's the author of the story collection Winter of Different Directions and the editor and publisher of the online journal Storyglossia.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Thieves Jargon/James Greco/Aaron Burch/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:01:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Matt DiGangi

Thieves Jargon provokes derision from drunks, students, and HR managers every day.

We published a new issue every week for three years. For the last year, we've been doing a new piece of fiction and poetry a day, Monday through Friday.

Greco's well-titled story hits me perfect right now, especially since I'm about to turn 30 and I just lost my job. The guy in this piece is familiar and gross: he reminds me of myself and who I'd never want to become. This story originally ran in Thieves Jargon's 100th issue.

Nominated Short Story: "I Tried, But it Turned Into a Deal" - James Greco

Review: by Aaron Burch

“I Tried” starts with a declaration – “There’s only one way to fry an egg.” From there, the full first three paragraphs are directions – literally, how to fry an egg – and they pull you in because of the confidence behind them. They aren’t a suggestion, or a recommendation, or even preference; there isn’t any “I think” or “if you ask me…” And then, the final direction before the eggs are done is to cover the pan. “People who don’t cover their eggs when they cook them,” the story says, “might as well be pissing up a rope.”

The heart of the story is right there from the get go. There’s some humor, confidence, an attention to detail and following directions step-by-step. From there, the story pulls back. These directions were Pete’s thoughts while he’s sitting in a restaurant, waiting for someone to show up. Everything starts to get filled in – Pete’s a bit down on his luck, has lost his job, has a yo-yoing problem with drugs and gambling and generally trying to keep his life together. And then the story pulls back again and we see a snapshot with him on a worksite with his son and their strained relationship and it feels like a story that we know well enough that when you give us the small details, we can fill in the rest. We can picture this character, we can see his son, we can build the whole movie scene of Pete sitting and waiting in this restaurant (maybe fidgeting with his hands or tapping his foot under the table).

Ultimately, the power of this story is in the framing. It opens with the confidence of Pete telling you there is only one way to fry an egg and then, through the story, we’ve seen his confidence waiver, that it yo-yos like the rest of his life and is likely something he is always trying to grab hold of and exhibit but he often lets it slip away. By the end, the meeting he has been waiting for has fallen through and he’s been ordering and eating food he can’t afford to pay for. And we see a bit – if only in a glance, and with a clearer picture – of the Pete we were first introduced to:

“While it is embarrassing to stiff on a check, there is also the confidence that he won’t get caught. Confidence is hard to come by and you take what you can get.”

Reviewer's Bio:

Aaron Burch is the editor of Hobart; writer of stories that have appeared in Phoebe, Monkeybicycle, Quick Fiction, elimae, Storyglossia, Smokelong Quarterly, and other journals; and enjoyer of arcade games including, but not limited to: Centipede, Ms. Pac Man, Frogger, and Galaga.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Word Riot/Mike Young/Sharon McGill/Short Story Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:31:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Jackie Corley

Word Riot started as the literary section of an eclectic music magazine, Communication Breakdown, in March 2002. Communication Breakdown faded away, but Word Riot expanded into its own magazine. We still like to think of ourselves as having a punk rock/DIY ethos and have purposefully maintained a small, dedicated staff to accommodate that.

We publish flash fiction, short stories, creative non-fiction, poetry, interviews, reviews and experimental writing. Our writers like to look behind the curtain and see what the wizard is up to. Many of the stories take place far past the frayed edges of decent society. There's a wander lust, a longing in many of the characters who people the site.

Mike Young's "Ten Gallon Bucket of French Fries" was a perfect fit for Word Riot. The characters are kind of lost, kind of looking for an escape from boredom. The language has a certain gritty, lyrical quality that is very representational of the type of work we're looking to publish on the site.

Nominated Short Story: "Ten Gallon Bucket of French Fries" - Mike Young

Review: by Sharon McGill

“You won’t stay fun,” says one of the geriatric denizens of Insert Hills in this short, bittersweet piece by Mike Young. The warning proves ironic as the adolescent narrator of Young’s story doesn’t seem to have any fun visiting his elderly aunt in this “dying folk’s community.” Insert Hills is a place that prohibits just about everything enjoyable: garden gnomes, teenagers, surprises and life. It’s the last stop for its residents, a place so boring it’s “enough to make you believe in infinity, or euthanasia,” and the perfect setting for this portrait of loneliness suffered by young and old alike.

Voice is the story’s most compelling feature; Young’s clipped sentences and disjointed chronology convey the aimlessness of his main character well. “Ten Gallon” feels less like a continuous narrative as clips from the narrator’s distracted mind. Snapshots of his activities at Insert Hills flicker by, like the moment he escapes his aunt and meets Mary and Kerry, a sister and brother the narrator “nearly punched” for their rhyming names. Young renders their first meeting succinctly, shadowing the narrator’s playful self-deprecation with an almost terrified sense of turmoil:

"Mary and Kerry broke some noise ordinances when they saw me. They were visiting their grandfather, and were famished for physical contact with the young and the spry. I was a wee fat lad, but I'd do. They ran up the driveway, waving and yapping. I felt like a raccoon. Their eye light was intense."

The trio returns to Mary and Kerry’s grandfather’s house to get high and celebrate Kerry’s “trophy,” a ten gallon bucket of Burger King fries. Young’s brief paragraphs ably reflect the mood of the narrator’s pot-brilliant musings as he decides to “just ruminate”—chew on both his random thoughts and the contents of that extraordinary bucket of fries. Like most drug-induced philosophers, the narrator’s mind wanders from the banal to the profound; the “symbolic” potential of the fries quickly morphs into the sense of death around them, the “hint of flowers and the loitering idea of coffins.”

Young’s story hits its humorous high when the three characters finally decide to take their fries for a drive though Insert Hills. But their youthful hijinks seem less like fun than an act of desperation, much like spontaneous behavior of the narrator’s aunt in getting the attention of a male neighbor. Despite the main character’s veneer of youthful apathy, anxiety underscores his thoughts and actions, a fear reflected in his aunt’s petty self-obsessions and the dire warnings of the community’s other residents. This more earnest sentiment highlights the story’s deeper, more frightening theme—a sense that this is it, this is life: a clean street amid acres of loneliness and only the occasional, wild bucket of joy.

Reviewer's Bio:

Sharon McGill received her MFA in fiction from Penn State University. She has short stories appearing most recently in Opium, Hobart and Redivider, book reviews published or forthcoming in Bitch Magazine, The Indiana Review and New Letters, and is a co-founder of Monday Night. Her personal website is sharonmcgill.net.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.

Temenos/Rusty Barnes/Sequoia Nagamatsu/Flash Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (T. J. Forrester) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:32:00 +0000

Nominating Editor: Marc Macdonald

The site was put together by Editor-in-Chief Mike Shafer. Temenos provides links to artwork as well as fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

This story was picked for our magazine because of the sharp language and clever idea. The images evoked were powerful and interesting, and there was very little cliched or boring language. The overall sarcasm of the piece also made it humorous and enjoyable to me and the rest of the editorial staff.

Overall, I look for stories that are creative and fresh, stories that take an old idea and give it a new spin or new life or begin with a new idea in the first place. The language is important to me, but I still look for some semblance of plot (at least something has to happen; a collection of images is not a story in my opinion). I am also really attached to flash fiction.

Nominated Flash Fiction: "The First Time He Met a Communist" - Rusty Barnes

Review: by Sequoia Nagamatsu

The title of this short piece would certainly pique the interest of any leftist heart or those on the other side of the political spectrum that hope to find something to get angry about. The story begins around “State street” at a protest but we aren’t given any details as to city or country. At first, a reader might think that we are in South America as the protest concerns “the plight of Corzabia, a small anarchist collective ranch located within Patagonian Argentina,” however, our protagonist, Corsley, quickly points out that he has never been to Argentina, his mother’s native country. Corsley is an apathetic nut seller and as to what kind of nuts and if they are organic or not (we are at a protest after all), we never find out. The story focuses over his observations of Tracey, who is introduced as a communist at the protest, wearing “calf-high boots and tight paisley shorts and a wife beater.” As strange or atrocious as her attire may sound, Tracey is seen as a kind of exotic, bohemian femme fatale in the eyes of Corsley, who lives in a world so far removed from the object of his fantastical desires.

As the story continues, we take a joy ride through Corsley’s day dreams full of milking llamas and riding tiny horses in Patagonia with his idealized Tracey. When Tracey finally speaks to Corsley in reality, “God, it’s so hot. I wish we could protest somewhere, you know, cool?,” the reader is pulled out of Corsley’s head for a moment and presented with some very revealing gems that likely evade our narrator. Tracey’s one line in the story and the fact that she pays for a bottle of water with a fifty dollar bill give the reader a sense of her true character which is most likely not anything resembling anarchists of the Spanish Civil War, Che Guevara or even the student anarchists of late 1960’s France as Corsley pictures her. Instead, Tracey is likely an archetype for the modern (often bourgeois) anarchist that is often far removed from the struggles that are being fought for.

Corsely brings the reader back to his world with his ruminations on anarchist pubic hair or lack thereof and the brutal fact that he will never know for certain. When he reaches into his pockets for Tracey’s change, he discovers that his money is gone. Whether Corsley has simply misplaced his roll of bills or if he has been the victim of a nut-stand heist, we aren’t really sure and probably don’t care. Corsely, enraptured with Tracey as he is, doesn’t seem to worried about it either. Tracey takes off with her free bottle of water and the reader is left with Corsley gazing at her in the distance, wondering, “what could you say to someone so committed, so anarchistic, so damned attractive?” and the reader perhaps has an answer for our simple minded, wide-eyed protagonist – nothing at all.

Reviewer's Bio:

Sequoia Nagamatsu is a fiction writer, playwright, event organizer, artist and activist. Over the past years he has been involved in the San Francisco International Arts Festival, several Fringe Theatre and performance festivals in the United States and has written and directed two plays. He is a former national campaign manager for an arm of the Sierra Club, where he helped coordinate several national protests and also produced the multi-state Green Planet environmental festival. His poetry has appeared in the Grinnell Review and he has fiction forthcoming in Underground Voices. He is also part of a team of international writers, One World, that has put together an anthology of short stories commenting on the third world and indigenous communities. Originally from the San
Francisco Bay Area and educated in Iowa, he currently resides in Niigata City, Japan with his two guinea pigs.

Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.