Gloria Hytner is the protagonist in Jason Graff’s edgy study of a disconsolate woman in a marriage she grows to resent. If it hadn’t been arranged by mistakes and bad luck, she wouldn’t have considered marrying working-class Daryl, even though he is a wood sculptor and a graduate of the Peckham School of Fine Arts.…
“The Box That Jane Built” is the lead story in Julie Elizabeth Powell’s collection* of four short stories. A psychological thriller, “The Box That Jane Built” is packed with the characteristics of this genre: sustained tension, ominous threats, foreboding plot twists, and obsessive mind games. Jane, the main character, is trapped inside a claustrophobic “cold-lined…
Between the third and seventh centuries A.D., a religion called Manichaeism originated in the Middle East (Near East) and spread from the Roman Empire to China. Its belief system was based on a dual cosmology of light vs. dark: the spiritual world of light, which was good, and the material world of darkness, which was…
Say you are a passenger on a bus you have ridden many times before. You are going to your appointment and it takes one hour and forty-five minutes to get there, but you give yourself an extra fifteen minutes, just in case. You cannot be late. At ten sharp, you will meet him again. Major…
Phil Klay, the author of Redeployment, the highly acclaimed collection of short stories and the 2014 National Book Award winner, was stationed in Al Anbar Province in Iraq from January 2007 to February 2008. This was a year known as the “surge,” when President George W. Bush ordered an additional 20,000 troops to Baghdad and…
You might wonder why Christine Sneed titled her novel Little Known Facts. Sounding like an encyclopedia that children could use to trip up their teachers, it might not seem like a book you would pick up and read. But take a chance on it. You will not be disappointed. It is clear-eyed, witty, and acutely…
The year is 1911. The place is a boardinghouse in the Pittsburgh Hill District run by Seth Holly, a son of Northern free parents, and his wife Bertha. Here, men and women, having migrated from the South, try to find meaning in their lives. Amidst the muscular dynamics of a Northern steel city, “marked men…