While I’m tempted to see this story as one primarily meant for mothers and daughters, I cried—and to be clear, I am a man—at the moment one character breaks the rules and does what he knows to be right despite how it might look. And, yes, I’m being purposefully vague.

Together these tones form a story and a familial history—one might even say, to steal a line from Vaughan’s ‘Elements of K,’ “an entire family, harmonizing like the Van Trapps.”

Kathy Fish’s Together We Can Bury It has accompanied me around the world. I’ve read the book on six planes and even in one of those wooden long boats in Thailand while my friends went snorkeling. No, the book is not Infinite-Jest long, but it’s also not a book you can read quickly then retire to a shelf. It accompanies you.

Humor is like a tight-rope made of razor blades. Some writers who try it come away with more cuts than it’s worth. Julie Innis dances on razors.

At its core, Kino is a complex family drama, a story of how the excesses—the sins?—of one generation poison those to come.

I come from the world of tent revivals and singings where simple folk and their homes, nature, God and medication played the leading roles. Actually, I’ve just come back from that same place: from Sheldon Lee Compton’s The Same Terrible Storm.

It was on the plane that I realized that the stories in From the Umberplatzen fly. They do not walk, carry, or drive. They conspire, in the air, like postcards as they float across the Atlantic on official business, transported by trusted officials, for the purpose of continuing love.

Carol Novack’s full-length collection, Giraffes in Hiding, contains 42 stories and the art work of 14 artists. The writing in Giraffes is sometimes called fiction, sometimes called poetry, depending on the reader. Bookstores shelve it as fiction. Imaginary persons gather tribally there, in a land Carol invented where church and state are separate.

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Jürgen Fauth
   Monday Chat with Gloria Mindock

About a dozen of the poems in Larissa Shmailo’s In Paran (BlazeVOX, 2009) also appear at Fictionaut. Shmailo’s transcultural poetry lights our side of the sea.

To publish: 1) to produce in a format so that a number of people can read it; 2) to produce in the proper venue for achieving authority and prominence. -Mark Wallace Flash fiction is finding a home at last through the free waves of the Internet.  Its deployment as a genre-long overlooked and passed over [...]