Heather Scott Partington is writer, teacher, and book critic. Her writing appears at The Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares’ Blog, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Las Vegas Weekly, Electric Literature, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA in Fiction from UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Campus. Heather teaches high school English and lives in Elk Grove, California with her husband and two kids. Follow her @HeatherScottP.
Many authors’ stories blend together across a collection; they struggle to convey a unique voice in each piece. Not so with Jen Michalski’s From Here. Though her characters share common…
In her new novel, The Man Who Walked Away, Maud Casey examines the history of psychology: both its inception and the powerful draw for doctors trying to uncover the causes…
The prose of some books keeps you at arm’s length. Resists the idea of transparency or security. Dares you to look deeper to find meaning. The sentences in Jac Jemc’s…
Fridays at Enrico’s (Counterpoint) Don’t write about writing. That gets said a lot. But like any absolute about what not to do, it’s only true until someone does it well.…
There are many reasons that an author would want to put a book–an actual physical object–into a reader’s hands, rather than just communicating data. Some books rebuff the notion that…
What sends us to our beds? Desire, sure. Sex. But also sickness. Sleep. Loneliness and healing. Jessica Keener’s Women in Bed is a collection of nine stories about women at…
Ethel Rohan’s stories are snapshots. Stark vignettes. We see her characters in the middle of conflict, just at the moment of their potential undoing. In Rohan’s collection, Goodnight Nobody, she…