reading notes

by Richard Flanagan
ISBN: 9780330423557
At first, I thought I understood that this book was a very different sort of book than Gould’s Book of Fish, an earlier novel of Flanagan’s I read and thought was remarkable.
Then I remembered this quote from Fish:

“Once upon a time, terrible things happened, but it was long ago in a far-off [...]

by Chip Kidd
ISBN: 9780061673245
This is the second novel from graphic designer Chip Kidd, who is better known for his work on book covers than his writing.
If you read The Cheese Monkeys, you’ll recognize Happy, no longer an art student but a young man who lands his first job at the firm of his favorite yet [...]

by Aimee Bender
ISBN: 9780982525401
This is the first book in the first series put out by Madras Press (I just wrote about Sweet Tomb by Trinie Dalton, also part of the series). I really love these square little books. They clearly demonstrate a single short story can be worthy of a book all on its own. [...]

by Trinie Dalton
ISBN: 9780982525432
One of the first four single short story/novella books published by Madras Press in December, all I knew about this book was that it featured a sugar addicted witch named Candy.
Of course I put it on my Christmas list.
I figured it would be fun and weird and I was not [...]

four chapbooks of short fiction by four women
by Amy L. Clark, Elizabeth Ellen, Kathy Fish,
and Claudia Smith
ISBN: 9780978984830
This book is the answer to why I sometimes comb through the shelves at small, independent bookstores reading every title on every spine: I never know when I’ll uncover a gem, something I’ve never heard of before that [...]

by Pasha Malla
ISBN: 9781593762384
This big fat collection of stories (thirteeen stories clocking in at just over three hundred pages) surprised me, not always in a good way.
I like odd. Strange doesn’t put me off, it usually pulls me in, unless it is just strange for the sake of being strange in that too clever by [...]

by Joe Meno
ISBN: 9780393067965
I discovered Joe Meno earlier this year, reading Demons in the Spring and later on Bluebird Used to Croon in the Choir. Both are collection of short stories, which I loved.
Meno isn’t new to novel writing, though this most recent book is the first novel of his I’ve read. I was curious [...]

by Michael Czyzniejewski
ISBN: 9780979312373
The stories in this collection — and there a lot of ‘em, two dozen in about two hundred pages — reveal over and over the impossibility of real people’s lives. Our lives, only not exactly us, just us enough to recognize, wonder, and wince.
Many of them have the kind of weirdness that [...]

by Brian Evenson
with illustrations by Zak Sally
ISBN: 9781566892254
In one of those chains of connected reading, I decided to look for this book after reading things Matt Bell said about Evenson; I was reading Bell’s website because I really liked his story in Monkeybicycle 6.
Evenson writes intensely creepy, very good stories. Warped and wrong and [...]

edited by Steven Seighman
ISSN: 15470504
It seems sensationalist to mention sex, twins, and midgets… but I just did. Yes, they are all mentioned, and two out of three are star characters and a recurring story topic. It may seem even more strange to say the stories in this issue really aren’t lurid, but really they aren’t. [...]