Billy Stone Luckett

Scott Laughlin     Before the judge stands a large man, almost three-hundred-and-fifty pounds, wearing a gray t-shirt and tan cargo pants. He hasn’t shaved in a few days, and his eyes, large and brown under his fat cheeks, have…

Ellie Rodgers   Oversexed, booze-soaked detective Frank Sunderson last delighted readers while hunting a cult Svengali in Jim Harrison’s The Great Leader. In that 2011 novel, Sunderson barely survived an ambush. Thankfully, he lived so Harrison could bring him back…

Shea Faulkner For the past nine years, I have worked as an educator in one capacity or another. Over that time period, I can think of few books that have challenged the way in which I teach, but Huck Finn’s…

Mary Slebodnik   Before I picked up The Undertaking,  I had never read a World War II novel with a Nazi supporter as the central character. I felt curious about how the author would prompt me to care about the…

Kim Shegog   Imagine a life devoted to navigating a labyrinth of doublespeak. Such is the existence of one young man, Sasha Parsky, in Paul M. Levitt’s historical novel, The Denouncer. Set under the rule of Stalin, the novel examines…

David Colodney Jonathan spoke openly about his father’s death, that he didn’t have to worry about his dad’s speechless sort of pain anymore, the inaudible facial grimaces doing all the complaining his voice refused to. And Jonathan told me his…

Mariah Gese A strange photographer befriended in a café, a secret gang of dissidents taking care of two children, an enigmatic man of many names and pasts—all roaming a forgotten Paris, not quite illuminated by Modiano’s dreamy yet particular wanderings…

Erica Kenick Your Okeechobee eye didn’t see us coming, Walkman and pet parrot in my lap, but I spied you from the boxed-in backseat on the East Coast map, a swampy turtle head so close to becoming your own island,…

Anni Liu I. It is Summer 1958, in the resort town of Dubulti, Latvia. The young attendees of a Soviet Bloc writer’s retreat are gathered on the beach for table tennis. Many of them, our narrator included, are on vacation…

Scott Laughlin   Ivan Turgenev was out for a stroll in Saint Petersburg in 1862 when he saw fires raging in the distance, the result of students calling for educational reform. A few moments later, he was accosted by an…