How do you want to be remembered when you’re gone? Personally, I’d like to be stuffed and propped against the fireplace of a descendant, standing with a fixed smile and thumbs-up gesture for all time. Or heroin-addicted bards could recite the story of my life among the Gods, just as they do for Ike Karton—the protagonist in Mark Leyner’s new novel, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. With a loosely linear narrative that changes forms at the rate of a Generation-Y train of thought, Leyner’s latest is a snapshot taken mid-flush of a society on its way down.

To grasp The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we must first get a grip on Ike: he’s an unemployed butcher from New Jersey who rocks an Akai MPC drum machine in his band, The Kartons. When he was eighteen, he was hit by a Mister Softee truck while on Spring Break. The Goddess Shanice hasn’t gotten over the fact that Ike left her off of his list of “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.),” and the God XOXO is Ike’s nemesis:

[. . .] [G]iven the overwhelming perception that XOXO has carte blanche access to the bards’ brains and to your brain (via public recitation, book, Kindle, Nook, iPad, iTunes, etc.), it’s reasonable to ask: Why hasn’t XOXO just killed T.S.F.N. by now? And the answer is, according to the experts, because XOXO is content to simply toy with the epic, to just keep fucking with it forever.

Fair enough, but still, what is T.S.F.N.? Well, it’s an epic poem, a book, a Reality-TV show, a collection of interviews, and blog comment threads… It’s everything that has anything to do with Ike. He is, after all, the hypersexual ruler of his stoop, but try not to judge him too quickly—he holds a kind of self-ascribed wisdom. Here, for example, is one of the entries on “Ike’s ’10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women’ List”:

9. Women have a very specific kind of courage that enables them to fling themselves into the open sea, into some uncharted terra incognita—whether it’s a new life for themselves, another person’s life, or even what might appear to be a kind of madness.

That’s nice, but it still doesn’t paint a clear picture of what the book is. Besides, Ike probably wrote that list while he was waiting to be interviewed for a butcher’s job at Costco. T.S.F.N. is really meta. I mean, here I’m supposed to be reviewing a book that’s about an epic that’s told in both classical storytelling forms and with twenty-first-century smartphone apps. Maybe T.S.F.N. is a really low-culture version of Faulkner. Don’t take my word for it, though. In an interview with T.S.F.N., “Real Wife” explains why she goes to hear T.S.F.N. live:

I don’t particularly want to see two hours of George Clooney playing a human resource specialist or Gwyneth Paltrow pretending to die of the plague or Ben Stiller portraying some disaffected slacker, no. When we come to hear a recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we’re not coming to hear fucking rich celebrities pretending to be bards. These are real bards. They are really blind. They are really itinerant. They are really high on ecstasy or psilocybin mushrooms or hallucinogenic borscht. They are not playing fucked-up bards. They are fucked up.

Leyner’s fun with form is the strongest aspect of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. The reader learns about Karton through what followers post about him online, what his enemies say about him, and what he writes to himself. By taking risks that bring to mind Vonnegut and Shteyngart, Leyner has written a book that attempts to transform the exploits of a nobody into the stuff of whacked-out folklore.

The novel comments on contemporary it’s-all-about-me culture, where our lives are broadcast via internet for all to watch or read about—even if all we’re doing is clipping our toenails. Ike, through his epic, lives his own 24/7 fantasy. He goes so far as to try to justify his self-proclaimed status by including the list, “What Makes Ike a Hero?” No item on the list gives a clearer reason than point B: “Basically, at every moment, Ike is trying to figure out how to constitute himself and how to situate himself in history. And this, among other things, is what makes Ike a hero.”

But regardless of Ike’s hero status, once the reader takes in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and gets used to the form, all that’s left is a handful of half-chuckles over the fact that Leyner uses the word “nutsack” so many times between two covers. The humor is pretty tired, and the novel needs something to distract the reader from the hovering sadness that comes with being reminded that everyone wants to be—and is—the star of The Me Show. Though junkie-bards might not recite my epic in the next century, I have tasted The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. I was expecting something much sweeter.

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Forget humble beginnings and glorious and tragic endings. We’ve been waiting for a writer to focus on the moments between all of that, to write about the transitional phases in our lives that don’t get very much play: the time we watched our attractive aunt undress from behind a cracked door, the early days of our recovery from a massive stroke, and that one time, when we were racially profiled by the cop patrolling the subdivision. Dagoberto Gilb’s new collection of short stories, Before the End, After the Beginning, celebrates the middle of the characters’ journeys and is less concerned with whether or not great things are on the horizon.

Out of money and looking for work, Guillermo―“Billy” to everyone else―stays with his Aunt Maggie in “Willows Village.” The arrangement looks good at first, with Aunt Maggie’s refrigerator full of food and endless bottles of wine to drink, but somewhere between interviewing at car dealership in Santa Ana, sleeping in an all-pink bedroom, and getting too friendly with his aunt’s houseguest, Guillermo begins to realize just how loose family ties can be:

I started looking at those photos she had everywhere, that I’d shoved under the bed and put in an empty doll box. Pictures of so many people I had never seen and not one of my family, of my mom or dad but especially my mom. My mom, who talked about Maggie all the time. Even if she was jealous of her, she admired her like a hero and envied her life. I wondered if I should tell my mom when I got back. So many photos of so many people and so many families and not one of our own family. Where did she get them all?

Gilb’s stories suggest that it’s not a life-changing event that helps someone to grow, but instead, it’s the choices they make afterward, and the support they receive, that will get them to the next point in their lives. Pivotal moments, like suffering a stroke, only serve as the context for learning one’s limitations and testing one’s determination. This is especially the case in “Please, Thank You:”

nancy insists on my being buckled up in my wheelchair to go to physical therapy. and she wont push me, unless were in a hurry. that is, unless she is. today shes in a hurry, and we have to go through an uphill hallway to the therapy room. i dont think shes a lesbian, though she has that short hair, ironed, tucked in shirt, fitted jeans, and never married to a man bark, and fire hydrant frame of… maybe its just her, who knows. shes nice to me, or means to be, when shes snapping. i like her like you do your hardass coach. even if i don’t know her win-loss record.

Dagoberto Gilb

The lack of capitalization and punctuation that Gilb uses in the story, though distancing at first, messes with conventional form and supports the narrative point-of-view. It does away with familiar personal-illness-essay explanations of how hard it is to recover from a stroke, and it shares the experience of difficulty with the reader.

In “Uncle Rock,” Erick is a kid in a transitional period of his own. He and his mother are both opportunists, but this story shows us the moment that Erick realizes that even though it’s fun when his mother’s dates try to win her over by giving him gifts, he’s responsible for his role of the polite, outgoing son. When he fails to live up to this, he blows it for both of them:

When she got upset about days like that, she told Erick that she wished they could just go back home. She was tired of worrying. ‘Back,’ for Erick, meant mostly the stories he’d heard from her, which never sounded so good to him: She’d had to share a room with her brothers and sisters. They didn’t have toilets. They didn’t have electricity. Sometimes they didn’t have enough food. He saw this Mexico as if it were the backdrop of a movie on afternoon TV, where children walked around barefoot in the dirt or on broken sidewalks and small men wore wide-brimmed straw hats and baggy white shirts and pants.

The last sentence in the above excerpt is a good example of Gilb’s careful parceling of details in each of the stories. Among a paragraph of stark sentences, there is usually one longer sentence with a focused description. This maneuver makes those few particulars stick with us, and we get to know the characters through them. Whether this is thoughtful architecture on Gilb’s part, or if it’s pure spontaneity, it gives this short collection weight.

Before the End, After the Beginning is a book of stories about the things that people learn in transit from one point of their lives to the next. There is hope here, even if one of the characters has lost the use of one side of his body. Gilb shows us these moments with a simple, artful honesty that gives the impression that while the lessons these characters are learning might not be the most profound, they are definitely some of the most important.

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Tired of the noise and headache of living in a big city? Looking to relocate to a small, quiet town? One where everybody knows everybody, and where you might smell a fresh-baked pie sitting on a window ledge on a spring day? If so, allow me to suggest Krafton, the Anywhere, U.S.A., setting for Alan Heathcock’s new collection of stories, Volt. That is, unless an average of one murder per every four households makes you uneasy.

Never mind the grim goings on in Krafton: One man kills his son in a farming accident, another kills someone for not moving their truck on a narrow road, the local law enforcement finds one of the town girls murdered in the woods, and the preacher lost his faith when his son didn’t come back from the war. It’s not all doom and gloom, I promise: Krafton has a movie theater!

“Fort Apache” is the lightest piece in this collection of stand-alone stories. It’s a snapshot of reckless (for the era) teenage shenanigans, in which a pack of adolescents and a recently returned WWII vet treat their boredom by nosing around the bowling alley, which has just burned down, and then catching the Duke in his latest starring role:

John Wayne cantered his horse through a pass lined with Apaches, their faces painted for war. Walt stood and the screen went dark. The crowd catcalled up. Hep punched his thigh. The projector’s beam lay warm on Walt’s neck, and he knew they’d all been plucked from danger and love, from another time, another place, and set back into this dark, sticky-floored theater, in the heart of nothing much that mattered.

Alan Heathcock

Westerns aren’t your thing? Not to worry, Krafton also boasts first-class contact sports. In “The Staying Freight,” Winslow copes with guilt over the death of his son, and the chaotic effects of his own violent disposition, by having people pay to fight him. For the lucky would-be Krafton residents out there, this is a good sign: One man’s self-destructive tendencies keep the local economy flowing and provide an amazing spectacle all at the same time:

The crowds grew, and Ham cornered off a stage with chicken wire mounted with trouble lights. Winslow stood bare-chested in the harsh light. Ham, in an ill-fitting suit, a felt hat adorned with turkey feathers, rang a bell and shouted, ‘Our world’s turned polite, some might say dainty. We all know how things used to be, men uprooting trees with their hands and backs, women fighting off panthers with hairpins and a mother’s scorn. Those days are gone, my friends,’ and he paused, eyeing them all. ‘Yet you still got that rage inside you, don’t you? Don’t you? Well, that’s why you’re here. Who’ll start us at a hundred even?’

If that’s not quite enough to make you box up your stuff and rent a U-Haul, then rest assured that, should you decide to move to Krafton, town officials and the citizens alike take their civic responsibilities very seriously. Take Helen, Krafton’s sheriff and the protagonist of “Peacekeeper,” who worked in Freely’s General for ten years before being elected to office. When a teenage girl’s body is discovered in the woods, the sheriff is fast on the scene:

The girl’s toes dangled inches from the ground. She wore only shoes. Clunky black shoes with square heels. Her naked skin glowed white against the dusk. Her mouth hung open and what little light came through the saffron boughs gleamed in her braces. Helen took off her own coat. She tried throwing the jacket up over the girl’s shoulders, but it slid off and fell in a lump on the ground.

It was the girl. Jocelyn Dempsy, whom everyone called Jocey. She raced motorbikes on a dirt track by the old mill, played JV basketball as an eighth grader. She loved Moon Pies. Loved cherry cola. She’d come to the grocery and buy them, and Helen would watch her eat alone by the road and return the bottle for a nickel before riding off.

Heathcock’s choice of setting gives Volt the thin thread that holds these stories together. With “Fort Apache” taking place in 1948, and “Peacekeeper” set in the winter of 2008, the collection is a kind of longitudinal case study of a town and its citizens. Krafton has never had much to offer its people, but they’ve tried to make the best of it—at least until they’re suffocated by their own longing to get out.

It’s decades of restlessness that have brought Krafton to its present state, and Volt is a chronicle of its implosion. Anyone who lives in a town like the one described here can appreciate Heathcock’s ability to define a place using singular, ill-fitting details that can be missed at first glance, but when revisited, show the promise of a life lived anywhere else. Sure, the world of these stories is bleak, but anyone from a place like Krafton will be reminded of how thankful they are that they’ve moved away.

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Just when you thought it was safe to catch a flight to another city for a date with someone you met online, Douglas Coupland’s new novel, Player One: What Is to Become of Us, comes along with its chaotic mixture of an oil crisis, a religious zealot/sniper, a self-improvement guru, a pastor who walked away from the faith and took his church’s money with him, and a woman lacking the emotional capacity to understand humor or metaphor, who makes a living breeding laboratory mice in her garage. The novel gathers these characters in an airport bar for five hours, while the world’s problems all come to a head.

Rick is a recovering alcoholic—and a bartender—on the verge of self-fulfillment thanks to the money he’s saved in order to buy the Leslie Freemont Power Dynamics Seminar System. It’s not just another day at work for Rick: Freemont is coming by in person to shake Rick’s hand, to take a photo and eight thousand dollars of Rick’s money, and to welcome Rick to the start of a new life:

I saw this Freemont guy on TV and it was like he could see the hole in my soul and had a way to fix it. He was so confident. People liked him. He knew how to succeed. He could prove to me that life is bigger than we give it credit for—that something huge can happen just out of the blue. We can enter a world where all the women wear those nice, clean sweaters from Banana Republic and sing along to the radio in key, a world where guys drive Chevy Camaros and never stumble or screw up or look stupid. I thought Leslie Freemont’s ideas would make me feel young again.

Douglas Coupland

At the same time, Rachel, the unfeeling lab-mouse breeder, is on the fast-track to having a family, something which will appease her parents and help her join the rest of society. While all of Coupland’s characters are on their own personal mission, it’s Rachel for whom desire comes from a feeling of necessity, the sense that she’s doing what she’s doing not from self-interest but for the sake of harmony:

Growing up, she tried to make herself human. She researched what makes humans different from all other creatures, and all she learned was that only humans create art and music—elephants paint with brushes, but that somehow doesn’t count. Only humans tell jokes, only humans cook, only humans have an incest taboo, and only humans have ritual burials. Rachel dislikes and doesn’t understand music, because all it is is sounds; she doesn’t understand art, because all it is is scribbles and dribbles that don’t mesh with photographic reality; and she doesn’t understand humor… However, from breeding white laboratory mice in the garage, she knows that an incest taboo is genetically useful, so she’s all for a taboo. And burial rituals strike her as smart, because they allow people to turn back into soil and be useful.

Player One moves quickly as result of its short chapters and moments of action. Each chapter is told from the point of view either of one of the characters or of Player One, an omniscient voice who takes the novel into the realm of sci-fi:

Humans have souls and machines have ghosts. Me—Player One—I’m actually more of a ghost than a soul, but it remains to be seen when I got here and how it happened… And then there will be big news from the TV set. And then Leslie Freemont will arrive. A photo will be taken. And then later, there will be rifle shots. And that is when there will be blood.

This is a high-concept novel, and the last section completely breaks form and provides a glossary of terms for this alternate reality—though the extent to which Player One’s reality is alternate is debatable. The novel gives commentary on the current state of the human condition, and an examination of what can go wrong when we place too much of our faith in anything, whether religion, self-help, or online romance. In spite of this, much of Coupland’s dialog reads more like banter, some of his sentences are pretty silly, and most of the funny parts, well… they’re just not funny. Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick have been here and done this, often with more satisfying results. The novel’s Sartrian formal constraints—taking place in one setting, in only five hours, but still aiming at the world’s biggest problems—provide an interesting set-up, but too often Player One feels like an exercise. Though it clearly wants to call attention to contemporary social issues, the novel’s weaknesses are more likely to make it part of the white noise of the media that might recognize society’s problems but have nothing to add to the Suggestion Box. If that’s the case, then thanks, but I’m well aware that the world has issues.

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What would you do if your best friend from high school, whom you haven’t spoken to in years, died and left her teenage daughter in your custody? Or, let’s say you’re an aging big fish in a small pond, and you’re on the verge of leaving yet another wife for yet another younger woman—indeed, what does one do?

Antonya Nelson’s fourth novel, Bound, poses these questions by examining the unraveling ties that bind, all while a notorious serial killer re-emerges and the United States is at war. Catherine Desplaines and Cattie Mueller are unaware of each other’s existence until Misty Mueller dies in a car accident. This happens about the same time that Oliver Desplaines, pushing seventy, is getting caught up in an affair with “The Sweetheart,” and Randall, an emotionally disturbed boot-camp inductee, goes AWOL. Each of these characters is on the verge of collapse, and all are bound together, whether biologically, legally, or emotionally. The resulting tension propels Nelson’s novel through a fast two-hundred and thirty pages.

When she learns of her mother’s death, Cattie runs away from boarding school in Vermont and meets up with Randall, who is also on the run. In pairing them, Nelson lets two perplexing personalities react on the page:

“I can make coffee,” she said eventually. So what? she answered herself.

“Fine,” he said. She delivered the cup to the lid of the toilet, where he stared at it briefly as if they’d had a misunderstanding. Maybe they had.

“I’m Cattie,” she said, leaving the small room. So what? He had finished shaving and was peering into the mirror at different tipping angles, noting his own features curiously. Cattie knew the feeling. Avoid a mirror long enough, and you become a kind of curiosity to yourself, some internal idea going to smash against the reality, and never in a good way.

Antonya Nelson

Never too comfortable, and yet never too ill-at-ease, Randall and Cattie are connected in a way that is most unique from the other characters: Though they don’t quite understand each other, they recognize that they’re misfits, and thus equals.

Nelson captures the sexagenarian Oliver’s youthful abandon in his love for “The Sweetheart” with the same keen accuracy, though the dynamic between them is different. Contrasting Randall’s relationship to Cattie with the secret passion between Oliver and “The Sweetheart” reminds readers of just how complicated being bound to someone else always is. Reader can see the mistake Oliver is making, but by reminding us how good making such mistakes can feel Nelson refuses to allow Oliver to be judged:

She had not been properly loved, Oliver decided. There was nothing more powerful than to be in the position of offering proper adoration to someone. He was still, after a month, meandering around in his own mind and heart about how they’d arrived at the amazing situation of having one another. It had happened before, and yet he never could be prepared for being struck by love. It fell upon him like an accident, like a car crash or knife cut, out of nowhere, without permission or intention. It was like luck, and he would not turn away from such a thing. He was stubborn, that way.

While most of Bound gives an up-close look at different kinds of relationships, the narrative takes the opportunity to pull back and show the larger context in which these relationships play but the most insignificant role—the world of Nelson’s novel has much bigger problems. Mainly set in Wichita, Kansas, the return of the serial killer known as “BTK” creates even more tension, and Nelson use readers’ curiosity and fear to great effect—the killer could show up anywhere, , and it’s only a question of when:

Every morning, every night, the self-named BTK appeared once more in the news; for twenty-five years he’d lain dormant. Incarcerated, the city speculated: insane asylum or correctional facility; how else to explain the hiatus? Once, it could have been plausible that he’d moved on, to another town, to another smorgasbord of potential victims. In leaving, he might have changed his methods, no longer binding, torturing, killing, but some other set of signature initials. Strangling, dangling, mangling, the SDM of, say, Sioux Falls or Grand Rapids.

The threat of BTK extends the novel’s geographical reach by exposing what Wichita has in common with any other city: At any moment, it could become a very dangerous place.

Bound is almost effortless to read—which is remarkable when one considers the number of complex relationships at work and the cutting truth with which each character is depicted. The novel has a broad focus on its characters’ social contexts, reminding readers that the world is not as small as it’s often made out to be. That a novel can accomplish so much in such tight space is otherworldly, and it speaks to Antonya Nelson’s gift for writing great fiction.

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What’s in a name? For Elfish, the heroine of Martin Millar’s new novel, Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving, the name means everything. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, Elfish and her ex-boyfriend, Mo, are not star-crossed lovers, and when they break up, both want ownership of the name Queen Mab for their bands. Never mind that Elfish doesn’t have a band. She has a guitar, a leather jacket held together by patches and safety pins, and a small crowd of half-friends just waiting to help her—they just don’t know it yet.

Elfish’s obsession with claiming Queen Mab for her own takes precedence over the lives and problems of the people around her: Aisha’s agoraphobia, Shonen’s bulimia, May’s homelessness, Aran’s debilitating depression. But when she realizes that they all have skills that will help her to achieve her goal—to recite Mercutio’s referential lines from Romeo and Juliet and perform a set with her band before Mo and his band take the stage, thus earning the rights to Queen Mab—Elfish secures their loyalty with a network of lies.

The abandon with which Elfish lives, drinks, and loves makes her a powerful protagonist. She is singleminded in her attempts to get Queen Mab off the ground, leaving no room for her to care about anything else—as opposed to her friends and bandmates, who are left defenseless because they care too much. Millar’s minimalist style and deftness in portraying the grimy sludge of Elfish’s living conditions and personal hygiene give the novel a true-to-life punk rock atmosphere:

Good party, thought Elfish, but did not manage to raise a smile. Needing liquid, she began to crawl. As she crawled the fresh sick on her clothes rubbed off on the floor leaving a trail behind her like a snail. Her hand came into contact with a can. Shaking it, she found that it was half full, and drank from it. A cigarette butt flowed from the can into her mouth and she was sick again, followed this time by long shuddering convulsions.”

Martin Millar

And what would a book titled Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving be without lots of sex? Millar’s portrayal of Brixton suggests there’s little else to do there besides drink and copulate. The sex comes early and often, and is held to the same standard of starkness and grit as any of Millar’s prose:

”You stink, Elfish. You stink of beer and whiskey and vomit and piss. You are disgusting.” She slid her tongue back into Elfish’s vagina.

Elfish, still fighting her headache and nausea, managed to unzip Aba’s jeans and slide her small hand as far in as it would go. She could not reach Aba’s clitoris but entwined her fingers in her pubic hair. They lay in this manner for some time in the ruined classroom, having sex among the debris with the rain now pouring in through the broken window, turning the mud under Elfish’s naked body into slime.

Aba turned Elfish over, wiped her with her sleeve, and licked her anus. Elfish wriggled.

Aba slid three fingers up her vagina, gripped her clitoris with her other hand and licked Elfish’s anus till Elfish came in a violent spasm that sent fluid spilling out to mix with the sludge on the floor.

The journalistic reportage of the story is broken up with brief interludes titled, “Stage Diving with Elfish.” They’re dreams or recollections of Elfish’s stage-diving history with her ex-friend, Amnesia, and they go a long way toward expanding the range of the novel, hinting that there is more to Elfish than her sex, booze, and rock-and-roll antics:

Now stage divers were mainly, but not exclusively, male, and while it was still exciting to see some burly eighteen-year-old youth hurl himself into space and land on the heads of the people below before disappearing into the mêlée with his legs in the air, it was reasonably commonplace. Elfish and Amnesia being female, and small, stood out, and became well known for their suicidal antics. While Elfish with her hair over her eyes and her metal-patched leather jacket was distinctive, Amnesia was even more so. She had long streaming hair bleached to a dazzling white and was always clad in black so that, flying through the air with a beer can still clutched in her hand and a triumphant curl on her lips, she seemed rather like a Valkyrie warrior plunging down from Valhalla. Or, possibly, a Valkyrie warrior being thrown out of Valhalla for repeated bad behaviour.”

Even with dreamlike vignettes about stage diving, this novel is as hard and fast as any song from the Stiff Little Fingers’ Inflammable Material. In two hundred pages, we come to know each character well, and this is the result of Millar’s careful selection and placement of each detail. His arrangement makes Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving one of the most artful examples of minimalism I’ve seen in quite a while: if any of the stage diving, sex, or literary references went on longer than they do, I doubt this novel would have the same appeal. Though there is impressive literary architecture at work, it never feels like an academic exercise; it’s more like throwing yourself in the mosh-pit or jumping from the stage and landing on the audience—you can just let go.

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What happens when a writer with a Southern sensibility takes her characters’ hopes and feelings seriously—even when a groom punches his bride in the face at their wedding reception; when a roofer spends his nights wrecking cars in Crashing Derbies; when the owner of a struggling drive-in theater loses business to a widower and his six boys and their makeshift concession stand? Alex Taylor’s new collection of stories, The Name of the Nearest River, treats working-class Kentuckians with dignity and respect, and the level of investment he has in his characters affects a reader to the point that Kentucky feels like home, and the characters feel like old friends.

If there’s a theme that holds these stories together, it is survival: These characters do whatever it takes to get through bleak situations. For Doug and Lum, the main characters in “A Lakeside Penitence,” that means “noodling” a flathead catfish to take to dinner after their Aunt Vergie’s funeral. They’re determined men, and not even a pair of swingers on a jet-ski can keep them from what they’ve set out to do:

Soon, Doug raised up a fish so large and ornery it was like dark fire stolen from the earth’s furnace, a great twisting old fish with Fu Manchu whiskers, something that had lain for so long on the lake bottom it had the look of wise sleep in its eyes. It was perhaps three feet in length. Doug lunged and struggled with it and finally climbed atop the slag pile and held it at arms length by the gills, his face showing stern amazement. He didn’t know how he could have missed such a creature earlier, or why only now, at this moment, it was being offered to him.

“That there is a goddamn fish,” he said.

In each story, Taylor is precise and economical as he describes his characters doing what they do best. His language is the characters’ language, but arranged just so, to the fullest affect. Taylor is a resourceful craftsman of sentences, like a carpenter with a house to build and only so much lumber with which to build it.

Alex Taylor

“We Were Men and the Fire Made Us” is the story of James Louis, a.k.a. Jay-Lou From Town, a teenager whose mother is in an insane asylum and whose father is a security guard at a furniture store. From early on, it’s clear that the setting has little to offer the budding James Louis: “This wasn’t the town. This was me and the old man after Mama went crazy and had to be taken to the state home in Hopkinsville. This was us living at the foot of a knob in a place that had never inherited a name. This was bastard land, just ground and dirt, trees and sky.”

Whenever James Louis meets up with his neighbors, Harold and Donald Basham, the three go out in search of something—anything—to do in a town so laden with general malaise:

Down long highways with the Frog’s tires spitting on the dark pavement, Donald in the back seat with his milk jug sloshing and Harold crooked over the wheel. We were routine, punctual. We made the thirteen miles into town, circled the McDonald’s, then passed the IGA parking lot thick with strange-agers who thought big crime and drank Koolaid mixed with vodka. We followed the town’s grid, glowed in empty streets, downed a heave of hamburgers and Nehi before wheeling again into the black swim of evening. We went to the trailer court and parked under the willows but all the windows showed black at us. There were no lights, nobody home.

So we went on.

The limits of the characters’ integrity are tested and occasionally compromised, as in “The Evening Part of Daylight.” It’s the author’s careful restraint that keeps the Kentucky setting interesting; certainly, readers may expect to encounter trashy behavior, but it’s clear that Taylor strives for balance:

It was Lustus Sheetmire’s wedding day and he’d just punched his new bride Loreesa in the jaw. The reception guests flocked around her. Most of them were near drunk and wept with disbelief. Loreesa staggered back, crumpling onto the mown bank of the lake where the reception was being held, an eruption of suds beside the still murk of the water in her dress and veil. Some of the guests had been fishing at the moment of violence, their hooks baited with shrimp and catalpa worms settling on the bottom, their poles and Baitcaster reels rising lewdly from between their legs. And now this.

Small-town life has rarely been written about with as much empathy as Taylor has for the characters and their plights in each of these stories. For all the author’s Southern influences—moral dilemmas akin to O’Connor, the ruthlessness of early Faulkner, and maybe the pathos of McCullers—the characters never feel like they’re the butt of the author’s joke; the care with which he crafts each story extends to the treatment of each character and scene.  Such attention toward characters’ feelings gives The Name of the Nearest River an authenticity that sets it apart from other contemporary fiction of the Southern persuasion, and shows Alex Taylor to be a distinctive new voice in American fiction. Whether or not you’ve ever set foot in Kentucky, reading these stories feels like returning to a familiar place.

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Have you ever wanted to visit Tonga, Tokyo, Hawaii, Taipei, New York, and other places in less than a hundred and twenty pages—and without the hassle and expense of traveling? In Midge Raymond’s collection of stories, Forgetting English, readers are taken on a brief, but surprisingly thorough, tour of these exotic locations; at the same time, they are immersed in situations without geographical boundaries, providing them with something comfortably familiar to take with them as they move across the map.

Raymond’s stories are about relationships—sometimes the expectations of one character exceed those of another, other times the experience is crucial in allowing one of the characters to grow, but in every case the relationships are delicately balanced on the breaking point. “First Sunday” looks at what one woman will do to retain her sense of dignity:

He looks down at me. We’ve learned very little about each other, and while that should have changed things between us, it hasn’t. He is engaged to a woman from his village, he told me last night, but they haven’t slept together and won’t until the first Sunday after they are married. I told him it didn’t matter. He asked if I had a moa back home, a boyfriend, and I said yes. I lied. I wanted things to feel equal between us.

No matter where one goes in the world, the story says, the pain of deep disappointment feels the same.

Through Raymond’s characters, we’re reminded that traveling with someone reveals the kind of person they are. The opening to “Translation Memory” is fraught with tension between two characters over the things that go unsaid:

In the airport terminal, Dan Marxen’s wife slips a pill between her lips as he pretends not to notice. The little white pills look as innocuous as aspirin, but for Julie they have become as necessary as water—and because she lets them dissolve under her tongue instead of swallowing them, by the time they board she will already be in a dreamy, hypnagogic state.

After takeoff, she lets her head fall toward his. “Did you know,” she asks sleepily, “that Japan has an earthquake every five minutes?”

Midge Raymond

One of the strongest aspects of Raymond’s writing is the way in which she shows relationships that are inches away from apathy—but in those few inches lies the hope that it might actually survive. Whether a relationship lasts or not comes second to a character’s need to believe that it could.

The exotic settings in which most of these stories take place are shown in an economical, but wholly effective, way. Raymond often chooses one or two concrete particulars and describes them so closely that we experience the setting alongside the character. In “The Ecstatic Cry,” we feel the narrator’s affinity for Antarctica through her fascination with emperor penguins:

This is the species that captivates me—the only Antarctic bird that breeds in winter, right on the ice. Emperors don’t build nests; they live entirely on fast ice and in the water, never setting foot on solid land. I love that during breeding season, the female lays her egg, then scoots it over to the male and takes off, traveling a hundred miles across the frozen ocean to open water and swimming away to forage for food.

Raymond trusts the reader to accept that the story is set in Antarctica without going out of her way to tell us how cold it is.

The title story in Forgetting English is about Paige, who starts her life over as a teacher in a language school in Taipei, and whose Chinese tutor, Jing-wei, teaches her as much about the Chinese Zodiac as about the language. The platonic relationship between teacher and student takes precedent over their romantic relationships:

They meet twice a week and spend less time on Chinese and more time on each other. Paige doesn’t know whether it’s Jing-wei’s guileless eyes, or the language barrier, or the fact that she is thousands of miles from everything she’s ever known—but she has found herself telling Jing-wei things she’s never told anyone. Her father’s death when she was four; her mother’s alcoholic haze. The revolving door of men—the first one, her mother’s boyfriend, the one who, in return for her silence, gave her enough money to cover her first semester of college; the last one, her boss, the one who, predictably, finally chose his wife.”

Forgetting English won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and I’m not surprised by that in the least. Raymond has quiet, unrelenting control over the writing; each story is compelling and thrives because each detail and line of dialogue reveals just a little more about the characters and the evocative settings. Reading this collection is like sitting on North Shore on Oahu, watching the sun go down over the Pacific—it doesn’t last long, but you won’t soon forget it.

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You know those people, the ones that tell stories and ask whether you want to hear the long version or the short version? After reading Stephanie Johnson’s story collection, One of These Things Is Not Like the Others, I’m inclined to think that she would ask for the short-short version. Here are stories about a woman moving on after a miscarriage, a man ruining an ex-spouse’s chance at selling the house they bought together, a son who tries to convince his mother that her cat is not the reincarnation of his dead grandmother, and much more; in every instance, Johnson succeeds in creating complex and emotionally real worlds in the smallest of spaces.

This book is like a photo album made of pictures collected at random from people on a busy street; each story is a single moment that comes from a different place, time, and gender-perspective, and each is narrated closely, creating a high level of intimacy between narrator and reader, so much so that the reader is still thinking about the characters long after each story ends. The narrator of “In Vino Veritas” is a librarian just home from a day’s work to find his wife, Elle, cooking dinner for Carver, a longtime friend of hers whom she was about to retrieve from the airport. Later, after dinner and over two bottles of Chianti, Carver explains why he became a dentist and the narrator, in turn, rises above his quiet jealousy to explain why he became a librarian:

Here’s the truth. I became I librarian because I enjoy the sacredness of the library. I’m not a religious man, I don’t believe in something bigger than I am that guides my life. I believe in wisdom—even if that wisdom is later proved wrong. The library is like a cathedral for me. To be surrounded by ages of knowledge, of words, of ideas… That’s really something.

Stephanie Johnson

Obviously, the story is an homage to Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” with its old-friend-over-for-dinner storyline, its character named Carver, and its narrator/husband who starts out jealous of his wife’s friend but later comes around to liking him. But it’s not necessary that a reader be familiar with “Cathedral,” or the other literary references that appear in the story, to like it. It’s more about getting to know the little pieces of a partner’s history that we couldn’t possibly be privy to. Even after we’re wronged by them—as the narrator was when Elle sold some of his book collection—having a clearer understanding of who they are through the small details of their lives makes coming home to them just a little bit sweeter:

When I returned during the late night news, she pressed herself against me. She held me as though she was afraid to let go. She undressed me: the buttons forcefully pulled through their holes, the squeeze of my belt digging into my abdomen and then the release of my khakis falling. She tugged me toward the floor. My sense of balance turned black and I surrendered to the man she thought I was.

“In Vino Veritas” is one of the longer stories in One of These Things, but some of Johnson’s micro-fiction is memorable too, as is the almost-prose-poem, “The Real Mrs. Robinson Takes a Moment to Reconsider.” In just under one hundred words, Johnson brings to life a woman’s shred of doubt as to the appropriateness of her love arrangement: “Without clothes, skin—like wreckage—tells a story. Next to his youth, your geological profile is marred by natural disaster. Scars and stretch mark dots, when connected, form considerable constellations.”

The title story, which closes the collection, is subtly disturbing in its portrayal of an elementary school science teacher, told from the point of view of one of the students:

The other girls gossip that the science teacher stands in front of the swings when he pushes them because he likes the white cotton underwear under their plaid skirts. They say he holds doors because he likes to see you from behind. At the end of recess, the first person in line has to hold his hand as you walk back into the school and the way his moist palm chokes your nail-bitten fingers makes your back ache, makes you feel like you need to pee, makes you want to hide in the last stall of the girls’ bathroom, squatting with your feet tucked under you on the seat as if you can compress yourself tighter and tighter until you simply disappear.

Johnson zeros-in on just the right details to make these pieces work. She’s able to create rich subtext in few words, which makes each story complicated and true, and makes each character feel alive and familiar. Of any new book that I’ve read this year, One of These Things Is Not Like the Others is the one I’ll return to, one that will reveal itself a little more with each read.

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An expanded on-line novel aimed at the teenage-slacker demo offers one too many penis jokes and pop-culture shout outs.

When the world faces the apocalypse in the form of “bratwurst poltergeists” and a demon-leader named Korrok from an alternate universe, it’s up to David Wong and his friend and video store co-worker, John, to save us. Well, who you gonna call? What started out as an online novel, John Dies at the End is being released to the unassuming public in updated and expanded form—consider this fair warning for the next time you’re surrounded by fire-breathing coyotes at the mall.

David and John start out as a particular kind of early-twentysomething Everymen. They have less-than-glamorous retail jobs, embarrassing cars, and a cache of infantile penis jokes. What distinguishes them from the rest is that, at a party one night, someone gives them a mysterious black, liquid drug that they dub “Soy Sauce.” Instead of killing them, like it does everyone else who takes it, the Soy Sauce gives David and John the power to see, hear, and do battle with Korrok’s army of paranormal followers.

At first, I was taken with the novel’s narrative voice. As Wong relays his story to Arnie Blondestone—who’s doing a cover story for American Lifestyle magazine on the author/narrator and his friend, his plainspoken storytelling was the one realist element I was able to hold on to while so many otherworldly minor characters and plot-twists were happening on the page:

“Let’s say you have an ax. Just a cheap one from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him… He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs—you know the type. And you’re chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face.”

It doesn’t take long before Wong’s sophomoric humor starts to work against him. At the same party where David and John are turned on to Soy Sauce, they play in a band whose set list includes songs like “Gay Superman,” “Camel Holocaust,” and “Stairway to Heaven.” After the “bratwurst poltergeist” scene, the reader anticipates that they’re in for a ride where the craziest of things can and will happen, and it’s easy to forgive a few immature jabs.

But after 372 pages of juvenile humor, not even the narrative voice is enough to save this book. David becomes the butt of quite a few of John’s penis jokes, and the occasional gay joke—and long before the end of the book, there’s one joke too many. Having been exposed to Soy Sauce, David and John are taunted by Korrok in ways that no one else can see or hear. For instance, whenever they hear a song on the radio, they hear a twisted version of the lyrics. Such is the case when they hear R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”:

“That’s me in the porno,
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Tryin’ to beat a tight-assed Jew…”

Come on… really? Just how many bonghits did Wong do before he sat down to write this thing? How old is the author? Moments like these make it difficult to stay focused on the world of the novel, which already asks so much from the reader in terms of suspending disbelief. Limp Bizkit frontman, Fred Durst, even makes an appearance as an apparition, and the lyrics of that band’s song “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)” appear in what I assume to be their true form. It’s impossible to tell if Wong is being ironic or paying some kind of tribute—but at that point, I was pretty much done with John Dies at the End.

Crude humor, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a problem. It’s just that we’ve already seen Clerks and Clerks II, Baseketball, and, for that matter, the Evil Dead trilogy. What’s on the page here has been done before, and done a lot better, despite the novel’s plethora of pop-culture references including awful ‘80s bands like Night Ranger. The story doesn’t generate much momentum, once a few inventive monsters have been dealt with. If you’re outside of the adolescent male demographic, it’s unlikely that you’ll get more than a couple of quiet smiles out of reading this book. But if you should end up with a copy, don’t fret—just give it to the first thirteen-year-old boy you see.

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