In Baseball, Birthday, and Ten-Cent Beer by Gregg Sapp, Solomon Zuch loves baseball, and his favorite team is the Cleveland Indians. The Indians' management runs a lottery for home games to pick birthday boys to serve as honorary ballboys. Plans were made for the entire...

Intrinsic by W.H.B. is a literary saga that follows the fall and redemption of Christopher Franklin. We meet Chris in the middle of his shift as a New York City taxi driver, steering his 2004 Ford Crown Victoria through Lower Manhattan, but he is a...

In Tom Strelich’s Mustard Seed, after President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, selected American families are secretly transported into Mustard Seed, a vast underground city beneath the hills outside Bakersfield that is built to preserve civilization during an expected nuclear war. Gill Hill grows up...

“There’s no such thing as a whole, functional, fuck-up-free human. We all have our problems and things that prevent us from being perfect.” True, and that may include Nicholas Bruechle, author of the novel All Writers Are Liars. At the very least, his characters certainly...

In Ali Hamdoun’s Habracadabrah, after surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Shinobu stays alive way beyond his expected lifespan. This is in the care of Seiren, who moves him to an isolated forest home where his damaged body requires constant treatment so he can keep...

When Kai Curran meets his long-lost half-brother, Wiley Bortov, who tracks him down to OldTown, Montgomery County, Illinois, he has no idea how much his life is about to change. Wiley not only reveals that he has a four-year-old son, Tam, but also that he...

In Richard Siciliano’s The Man Who Obviated Christmas, Edward Brash, a middle-aged manager who has spent years limiting his life to work and routine, walks out of his office on Christmas Eve and is pulled into a street crisis when children tell him their kitten...

Butterfly Pinned by Leslie Liautaud is a dark psychological thriller that tells the story of college junior Marin, who enters a respected Chicago university with the hope of escaping her broken Midwestern family and reinventing herself. She quickly becomes enchanted by Bette Winston, a wealthy,...

Robert Frost once wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” In Autumn Ridge by Micaiah Munro, that sense of home is tied to a quiet cabin in Montana, where family history and personal struggles...

“The boy was an unknown, but Claire thought unknowns could eventually make something of themselves.” Of course she did, because Claire Benson, the protagonist of The Dyer Legacy by Albert Sipes, is goodhearted to a fault. The story begins when Claire narrowly escapes two would-be...