For whatever reason, one of the few things I retained from high school history class was the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Nearly 150 people died, and the event helped usher in better building codes and working conditions in America. …

Emmalea Russo’s debut book, G, is both tightly organized and extremely obscure. Russo’s artistic intentions are quite present, but their actual shape is impossible to discern. Reading G is a reflective experience, and each reader’s experience is going to be different, depending on the inside of her own head. The…

This is mostly a note to Medium folks who have begun following me due to my private schools piece. Hi, and thank you! If you liked that article, I’d like to direct you to something I wrote that appeared on October 10 on the Mantle. It’s a review of Tana…

Alice Hatcher’s debut novel, The Wonder that Was Ours, was published by Dzanc on September 4. I interviewed Alice for the Masters Review about her book, asking all sorts of burning questions I had about it. However, we got a little carried away, talking to each other, and some of…

Of the eleven stories in Katharine Haake’s new collection, Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld, nine are narrated primarily in first-person plural. Five deal with ostracism and judgment by a clan of some kind, whether a family, a neighborhood, or a town. Only one is constrained enough in its…

Note: I wrote this for a specific column, Stress Purchase of the Week, and it was kindly turned down. I elected not to revise it (much) before repurposing it here. My stress purchase last week was books. Of course it was books. What’d you think it would be? Clothes? The…