What I Read in March

With all that happens around a person's 40th birthday, I somehow managed to find some time to read some excellent short fiction in March. The ones included below come from a variety of online magazines but I'm not going to pretend that this is an exhaustive list:

Things Crumble, Things Break by Nate Southard. Liked this one quite a bit. Chemical spill or accident leaves a town of crippled, their bones so fragile a gentle push could stave in a chest. A man and his girlfriend contemplate leaving their quarantine even as a heavy sadness fills in all of the weak parts of their determination. The horror here is in the ease of emotional investment in fragile, doomed beings.
In the Shade of the Pixie Tree by Rodello Santos (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) something about this reminds me of Lord Dunsany: a sweet but ultimately tragic tale of a young witch and the slow unwinding of a difficult spell. Fantasy that takes familiar tropes like pixies and witches and makes them new again will always win a place in my heart.
You will always have family by Kathleen Kayembe (NSF). Excellent long form story about a deteriorating family transplanted into America. Sort of a Faulkner Gothic as if told by Junot Diaz in a very macabre mood.

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Also, I got a nice surprise today in the mail - the physical copy of the anthology, "Book of Blasphemous Words," my story "Killing the First Gods," appeared in. If you're inclined to read a melancholy story of the dead gods of the Upper Paleolithic, this story and others included may be up your alley.

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Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...

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