The end of the story comes in the opening paragraphs. The jilted fiancé of the car’s owner knocks the door, asking for the vehicle back. The new convenience closing as quickly as it opened, a thing sealed off to be remembered fondly and perhaps pined for. The pessimist might be resentful of such an experience, but Johal chooses a different direction. As though the situation was proof things are given just as readily as they are taken away.

Echoes of this feeling resonate across Gurnaik Johal’s stories. Characters who have been denied so much—be it the luxury of a car or the immigrant’s sense of belonging—living and hoping in spite of everything. What results are tales less interested in definite statements on identity and history, but more the possibility within circumstances as they have been dealt. Be that making the best of what is present or refusing to accept the present as the only available thing.

A subtle interconnection threads the pieces, allowing Johal to create and then subvert expectations within his own individual characters, to further widen their sense of possibility on the page. We Move might span half the globe and multiple generations, but the same openness to joys both future and past shine through all the same.

We Move is out now via Serpent’s Tail, including a new paperback edition.

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The two parts of the collection are presented backwards, with Campfires of the Dead—Christopher’s debut originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1989 and now out of print—preceded by The Living, an unpublished collection of work written between 1990 and 2004, before Christopher’s untimely death a few years later. Much of the older work was written under the tutelage of Gordon Lish, a fact it wears nakedly and mostly for the better (if occasionally for the worse). The newer experiments further (a four-story meta-story told through titles and printed receipts?), and manages to be at once warmer and more cool. But ultimately both are linked in their affinity for people existing on the edge of things. Be it the dumpster diving protagonist of ‘Lost Dogs’, the third wheel chicken sexer turned cow manicurist of ‘The Careerist’ or the driver and passenger sharing a flirtatious heart-to-heart via the mirror of a bullet-pocked taxi cab.

Stories plagued by the pain of life, and by the desire for it all the worse. “There is, I know, loneliness in this world so great that you can see IT and hear IT in the ticking hand of a watch,” he writes in ‘Hunger’, where a death row killer writes to the cook of his final meal. “ALL THAT, then how it was again when our time together got almost too good.”

Campfires of the Dead and The Living is out now via 11:11 Press.

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Originally released in 2012 as Arashi no pikunikku by Kodansha in Japan and The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Soft Skull Press in the US, Picnic in the Storm cements Motoya’s position in the contemporary short story scene, sitting somewhere between Alexandra Kleeman and Carmen Maria Machado in her idiosyncratic depictions of the human experience. What if normalcy is self-imposed and limiting, Motoya asks. What if embracing the weird is to realise your true self?

Translated by Asa Yoneda, the book contains eleven stories that bend our world ever so slightly out of shape, like a warped mirror that catches the light at odd angles. ‘The Lonesome Bodybuilder’ perfects the idea, presenting an ostensibly ordinary couple with ordinary problems—boredom, loneliness, miscommunication, perceived disinterest—and introducing a bizarre extra dimension. In this case, the pursuit of rippling muscle, body oil and tanning lotion, the chemical glare of too-white teeth. Feeling ignored by her husband, the narrator starts a severe regime of weight-lifting and exercise and high calorie consumption, soon evolving into a freakishly muscular physique. Her young male trainer might evoke suspicion but the narrator is clear that it isn’t an affair she is after. “I just wanted to luxuriate in some taut muscle.”

Her colleagues are amazed, supporting her quest by setting up an area at work where she can exercise throughout the day (turning on her only when she fails to intervene when a dog attacks another outside. “A proud bodybuilder never puts their power to practical use,” the narrator explains). Her husband, on the other hand, fails to notice the alarming growth of his wife. “Even though my chest felt so solid it was as though there was a metal plate under my skin,” she complains, “my arms looked huge enough to snap a log in half, my waist sported a six-pack, and from a distance I looked like a big inverted triangle on legs.”

Despite her friends insisting that’s just what men are like, the narrator becomes increasingly exasperated, eventually breaking down in tears after he compliments her on a haircut she hadn’t had. “You only care about yourself,” she tells him. “The longer I’m with you, the more unsure I become of myself. Am I really that uninteresting?” There’s a Lynchian quality to the scene as the narrator strips to her show bikini, that stilted soap opera melodrama of Twin Peaks where the usual decorum of restraint and reserve is lost. The ending is a happy one, the couple stay together, but the lasting sensation is one of perturbation, as though some depth of humanity has been revealed, some concentrated core of desperation that we spend our days trying to ignore.

Elsewhere, the stories of Picnic in the Storm range from the odd to the downright fantastical, from a creature hiding in a changing room cubicle to a creepily prescient old man who rides typhoon winds on his umbrella. ‘I Called You by Name’ keeps the strangeness out of view, the protagonist distracted by a bulge in a curtain during a meeting but never seeing who is behind it. “I’ve wasted too much of my life waiting around for ambivalent beings like you,” she tells it. “Ghosters. Men who let you down easy. You must think you’re really something. Calling yourself a phenomenon.”

An agony aunt gives questionable advice in ‘Q&A’ (“Challenge him to a duel,” she tells someone struggling to escape an abusive boyfriend), an artist locks themselves in an isolated cabin and is visited by a possibly supernatural pack of canines in ‘The Dogs’, and a wife imagines burning the titular character in ‘Straw Husband’—a literal straw man prone to outbursts of rage. Such violence is never far away in Yukiko Motoya’s work. Couples duel to the death in ‘The Women’, strange beings attack traditional markets in ‘Paprika Jiro’, while the gender-flipped oedipal tale ‘How to Burden a Girl’ sees off wave after wave of gang goons, the father and daughter fighting them off with swords and guns.

‘An Exotic Marriage’ tells of Kitae, a woman who, upon examining photographs, realises she is growing to resemble her husband. The relationship becomes weird and strained, their characters bleeding into one another. The slovenly husband becomes suddenly obsessed with cooking, Kitae finds herself drinking beers in front of the TV. The whole thing has an air of performance, as though they are, however consciously, carrying out roles they assume they other wants (or hates). The closing scene is as fantastical as anything in the collection, Kitae breaking the vicious circle of mimicry and second-guessing. “You can stop being husband-shaped now,” she yells. “Take whatever from you want to be!” The husband explodes and changes into a flower, a peony that Kitae drives into the mountains and plants, where he blossoms into something huge and beautiful.

Such a sense of release encapsulates a collection concerned with the truth behind things, asking if it is a moral imperative to crack the surfaces of the superficial world, even if the truths within are icky or gory or downright embarrassing. Do we owe it to ourselves to be faithful to our deepest feelings, or do we owe it to others to smother them dead? “Of all athletes, I most respect bodybuilders,” the trainer in ‘The Lonesome Bodybuilder’ tells the narrator. “They hide their deep loneliness, and give everyone a smile. Showing their teeth, all the time, as if they have no other feelings. It’s an expression of how hard life is, and their determination to keep going anyway.” The narrator thinks about it for a while. “But,” she replies, “if you’re always smiling like that, don’t you lose sight of your true feelings? Is it right to smile when you’re so lonely you could cry?”

Picnic in the Storm is out now via Little, Brown (UK), Soft Skull Press (as The Lonesome Bodybuilder in the US) and Kodansha (as Arashi no pikunikku in Japan).

Photo by Rana Shimada

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Opening story ‘Wagner in the Desert’, with its detailed and mocking attack on the privileged “modern hustler[s]” like filmmakers and writers, doubles up as an introduction to the type of ‘special’ person Greg Jackson is targeting. These are people “conscious enough of [their] materialism to mock it,” those who listen to acts like U2 and Morrissey and Kylie Minogue “post-ironically, which is not to say exactly, sincerely.” They drive hybrids, donate to charities, sit on boards of non-profits. “We were not bad people, we thought,” says Jackson’s narrator. “Not the best, a bit spoiled, maybe, but pleasant, insouciantly decent. We paid a tax on the lives we lived in order to say in public, I have sacrificed, tithed, given back. A system of pre-Lutheran indulgences. Of carbon offsets. A green-washing of our sins. We were affiliated. We had access.”

The narrator’s simultaneous ambition and guilt shows the great success of collection, its ability to go beyond easy mocking and give the characters and situations a human depth. Greg Jackson is a satirist for sure, but not a peddler of cartoons, and in his nuance opens up a far murkier picture of the elite life—where narcissism is balanced by an equal and opposite force, the ever-pressing, near-spiritual need to justify and validate one’s existence to others. They are not special, and they are all too aware of the fact. If the hedonism of Bret Easton Ellis’s work is a thin, flat surface, then Jackson’s is that same superficial lifestyle stretched taut around a dark void, a lack that is mapped by what surrounds it.

Philosophical attempts to address this void are central to Prodigals, though the (often drug-fueled) epiphanies reached by its characters rarely seem to last—Fool’s Revelations, synaptic firings mistaken for metaphysical meaning. High on something like meth, the protagonists of ‘Metanarrative Breakdown’ discuss “the prime fabric of meaning” with addled conviction, while ‘Epithalamium’ finds a cynical, vain woman come to see her self-image unravel in her loneliness (““The terrifying possibility […] that you were not at all the composite of your past, but merely the confused nerves of the present, ever-supplanting moment”). The narrator of ‘Dynamics in the Storm’ could be said to mistake sexual tension for spiritual significance, driving out of New York with his therapist to escape a superstorm that is descending upon the city. For Jackson’s prodigals, self-obsession is both a curse and posited cure—the lie of exceptionalism gnawing a great hole in the centre of their souls, but also suggesting that they might, just might, be special enough to transcend the human condition.

Prodigals is out now via Granta (UK) and Picador (US).

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The collection opens with ‘The Finkelstein 5’, a story that immediately sets out Adjei-Brenyah’s distinctive style—a blend of horror and farce that’s loaded with haunting truth. A white father is on trial for decapitating five black children, The Finkelstein Five, with a chainsaw, though gets acquitted (and deified) due to his appeal to the wholesome family values of the all-American jury. “I did what I had to do,” he says. “And you know what—I loved protecting my kids.”

The story’s narrator Emmanuel Gyan must negotiate this world, his Blackness carefully managed on a scale from 1-10, spiking should he ever swear or shout or wear his cap backwards. A pressed suit and reserved attitude might get him down to a 2.9, while too-baggy jeans might see the needle creep past 5.0 and into dangerous territory. Despite turning the other cheek in the face of racism for the sake of self-preservation, Emmanuel finds himself miss out on a job because of the colour of his skin. “Well, thing is, we have this guy Jamaal here already,” the boss says. “And then there’s also Ty, who’s half-Egyptian. So I mean, it’d be overkill. We aren’t an urban brand.”

Which is how he finds himself dragged into The Naming, a movement quickly labelled a terrorist organisation that sees black people attack whites while chanting the names of the Finkelstein victims. However reluctant Emmanuel might be, the process seems inevitable—violence is coming for him, and he for it, no matter how hard he fights the pull. No amount of Blackness manipulation can save him in the end, and through the act of retribution he realises a perfect 10.0 in the story’s conclusion, before sharply falling to “an absolute nothing point nothing.”

In keeping with the tone of contemporary society, realism and surrealism are intertwined throughout Friday Black, Adjei-Brenyah managing to present a heightened, often speculative world as the perfect representation of our own. The crazed capitalism of Black Friday is taken to its violent extreme, like Dawn of the Dead without the need for Zombie-virus allegory. A man and his father get lost in the Kafkaesque bureaucratic maze of an unfamiliar hospital, a matter complicated by his dealings with a mysterious “Twelve-tongued God” that has placed a magical brand on his back. Aborted fetuses return to talk with their father, riding in his pocket as they visit their mother’s fortune teller. Post-apocalyptic teachers discuss the Big Long War and the Big Quick War and swear to complete sincerity to avoid any repeat, even if it involves telling ugly kids they are ugly and stupid kids they are stupid. Adjei-Brenyah keeps going and going, his imagination outdoing itself in conjuring unbelievable situations that carry portentous weight, or else a sense of déjà vu.

The George Saunders vibes are at the forefront of ‘Zimmer Land’, a story that sees all of Adjei-Brenyah’s key themes intersect. It imagines a commercial role-play experience which allows people to experience danger and violence without any actual danger and violence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this allows users to act out their base desires, exposing the racial hatred that has existed at the core of the Western World for time immemorial (the title doesn’t take a lot of parsing in this context). Isaiah gets shot for a living by sanctimonious white men; men addicted to the rush and the blood and the moralising of their crimes, men making victims of themselves with Godly certainty, covered in the blood of other men.

The final story is like Groundhog Day meets Threads meets Battle Royale, taking the bloodthirsty insanity of living the same day over and over at the culmination of nuclear war and somehow giving it a quiet humanity. The feat is something of an Adjei-Brenyah trademark, his ability to breathe souls into his characters despite their darkly ridiculous surroundings quite possibly his greatest strength.

Through its peculiar blend of horror, sci-fi and satire, Friday Black presents America as caught in a funhouse mirror—fear and fury and fully-righteous greed brought into relief and magnified into hideous detail. Still, no matter how exaggerated and distorted the reflection, its eyes are always staring back, as cold and star-spangled as ever. Adjei-Brenyah is undeterred, staring right back with an unflinching gaze, all the while grasping for anything that might represent a human heart that still exists within the monster ahead of him.

Friday Black is out now via Houghton Mifflin Harcourt imprint, Mariner Books.

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Powers refuses to be silenced, which translates to a lot of (intentionally) heavy-handed dendrological metaphors, a lot of (non-ironic) talk of rediscovering the beauty of nature and much (sincere) discussion of how humans are terrible and short-sighted and doomed in the way of a Greek tragedy. Essentially, a lot of trees. However, the fact that such a premise feels tiring, and the metaphors ham-fisted, and the views unsophisticated only confirms Powers’ point. There’s nothing hip or trendy about this message. There is no cultural capital to be earned, no badges of honour to wear, no quick redemption to cash in at the next available opportunity.

The problem with such a blunt method of writing is that it will not work for everyone. Being whacked over the head with our own lunacy might cause the already convinced to sit up and take more immediate action, but is likely to turn away many more who feel undeserving of such a beating. Which means, with complete admiration for Powers’s efforts, there is still a need for subtlety and nuance.

Lauren Groff’s latest short story collection Florida represents one of the best examples of this alternate take on climate fiction. Whereas The Overstory presents nature as a central character and climate change as a capitalised THEME, Groff instead presents them in a more natural way, just as much a fact of life in her vision of Florida as the characters themselves, despite no explicit pontificating on the subject. Importantly, the nuance here is not so-called ‘balance’ where opposing views are given airtime. Climate change is still happening. Things are still bad and getting worse, and still no-one is acting quickly or substantially enough. The difference is in the tone of communicating this, and the manner in which Groff positions herself in relation to the audience. If Richard Powers in a teacher or priest, warning of an approaching damnation, then Lauren Groff is a next-door neighbour, going through it with you.

Though the feeling is only occasionally born of direct fears around the climate, the prevailing atmosphere in Florida is one of dread. Large killer cats stalk the treeline (‘The Midnight Zone’), sinkholes open up beneath foundations (‘Flower Hunter’), hurricanes blow gators, gar and ghosts directly into people’s houses (‘Eyewall’). People are just as threatening, such as the strange shopkeeper of ‘Salvador’, or the herpetologist father of ‘At the Round of Earth’s Imagined Corners’ who brings up his son in a house of venomous snakes. However, the creatures of the latter are not so much the primary source of dread but its physical manifestation, the anguine symbolism representing something deeper in our relationship with people, the lizard-brain revulsion outshone by an equally primal desire to belong.

A similar urge underpins fear in all its guises in this collection, the various modes of suffering and death merely variations on personal isolation. Many of the stories involve abandonment, from the aforementioned herpetologist’s son to the deserted sisters of ‘Dogs Go Wolf’ and the grad student’s abrupt slide through the cracks of society in ‘Above and Below’. Thus, Groff’s position feels less ideological than visceral, driven not by some educated understanding or calculated decision, rather a direct and fundamental fear, stories dictated by dread.

This is typified best by several linked pieces which share the same principle character, a noticeably Groffian woman who lives in Florida with her husband and two sons. The Florida of this woman’s world is a canary in the coal mine, a ground zero for the approaching catastrophe. Her anxiety is not concerned with the likelihood of disaster, but rather the scale. Degrees of ruin sorted into a hierarchy—individual, familial, local, regional, national, global—and the question becomes whether a personal calamity will get to the characters before the climate slides into a planetary one. Will they get picked off one by one by a monstrous feline before the sea engulfs the peninsula? Will their house collapse into a sinkhole, killing them before the real trouble begins? Because, while the titular state might be uniquely dangerous, with its cottonheads and gators and mythic black panthers, the real looming threat is more ubiquitous and inescapable. “She had always thought this would be the place to be during the climate wars that she sees looming in the future,” Groff writes, her protagonist finding Paris hotter than she had imagined. “But maybe there is no place to be; maybe all places on a hotter planet will be equally bad, desert and hunger everywhere.”

In the opening story ‘Ghosts and Empties’ we find her wandering the streets after dark, afraid to be in the house because of a propensity to yell, leaving the parenting duties to her husband, who does not yell. However, far from appearing unhinged, the narrator comes across the sane one. Indeed, the blunt aggression could be said to be analogous to Richard Powers’ writing style, a sudden burst of plain-speaking in a world of repression. Who wouldn’t yell, knowing what we know, living how we do?

During the day, while my son’s are in school, I can’t stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash pyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species, millennia snuffed out as if they were not precious. I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow date this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.

Florida is out now via William Heinemann (UK) and Riverhead (US).

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Writing for The Guardian, Power has produced a long-running series or articles, ‘A brief survey of the short story’, exploring the entire gamut of short story writers, from Nabokov, Barthelme and Beckett to O’Connor, Munro and Bowles. Such a comprehensive and enthusiastic study betrays a deep affinity, and the way in which Power delves into the nuances of these authors highlights an insightfulness indicative of deep, considered thought. Indeed, the study of the medium is apparent in his own fiction, and it becomes easy to view Mothers as a sort of love letter to the very concept of creating and telling stories.

And, on one hand, this is true. Each story is refined to the point of pristine efficiency, so much so that one finds themselves checking if the ‘debut’ claim is some sort of mistake. Power’s pacing is expert, his language tight and concise yet still ringing with poetic beauty. The denouements range from shockingly abrupt to unnervingly flat, keeping the reader in limbo from one story to the next. All in all, everything any true lover of the form looks for in short fiction.

However, look past the craft, and Power is far more ambiguous about the relative benefit of stories. The characters in Mothers are united by a fundamental loneliness, and to various degrees embrace fiction as a defence mechanism or escape route. In some, such as the ‘Colossus of Rhodes’, characters try to save themselves through the creation of stories, and in others, like ‘The Crossing’, characters try to end stories before they can take root, or else switch the tracks to lead their story away from those around them. In others still, characters are overcome by the fictions they have created. Take for example ‘Jimmy Kingdom’, in which a stand-up comedian finds success in impersonating a now-dead legend of the genre, but loses himself beneath the semi-fictional character he has created. Or, perhaps worse, ‘Above the Wedding’, where a man weaves an entire romantic fantasy out of a drunken tryst with one half of a couple, and travels to their wedding with the hopeful/delusional understanding that the groom will confess his love for him.

The message being, no matter how they are intended, stories are not purely curative forces. People are pulled apart by the fictions they cling on to beyond reason, and others troubled by stories they are trying to forget. Or even, as with the Swedish burial site of ‘The Having Dolmen’, stories they don’t believe or even know to begin with. The will to escape loneliness might be the common cause of all these tales, but successful escape is far from the universal effect.

In the three interlinked stories titled Mother, all based at some point in the life of Eva, stories are told as a way of rationalising pain and suffering. In the first, ‘Mother 1: Summer 1976’, Eva is a girl struggling to understand the alien detachment of her mother and complete absence of her father, of which she has only ever seen in a single photograph. “I was so excited when she let me look at [the picture], but I never asked her to,” Eva narrates. “It seemed right that I shouldn’t be able to see it whenever I wanted. It needed to be earned, albeit through some mysterious process I didn’t understand”.

‘Mother 2: Innsbruck’ finds Eva in her thirties, travelling alone with a guidebook her mother had kept all those years before. Like many of the stories in the collection, Power’s realism is never quite punctured, yet is haunted by something just out of sight, a lingering sense of something more, or something worse, that might announce itself at any moment. The piece ends with a seemingly unimportant decision, though ‘Mother 3: Eva’ reveals the tragic truth. This closing story jumps ahead a few years again, told from the perspective of Eva’s husband, Joe. Eva, now a mother herself, has become an exaggerated version of her own mother, cut off from those around her and unable to properly communicate the pain she is experiencing.

With the modes of communication damaged in real life, their narration feels like Eva in ‘Mother 1’ and Joe in ‘Mother 3’ return to tales from their lives as a way to explain or make clear the burden and cost of mental illness, sharing the distance and irrationality not as some accusation or punishment but rather explanation or even apology. Things are bad, they seem to be saying, and I am distant, but here is why.

However, the cyclical nature of the three pieces, which appear to have history repeat itself by the closing lines, casts ambiguity onto the relative value of such a process, as though through trying too hard to understand and empathise, you are left open to the same evils. While offering explanation and context to otherwise cryptic events, being too eager to explain everything in light of past trauma or difficulty, to place yourself within a story, might end up being it’s own peculiar kind of fate—a self-fulfilling narrative that destroys the very person that willed it into being.

Which isn’t to say it’s all bad. The final passage of ‘Mother 3’ finds Joe reading what is essentially ‘Mother 1’, and it is hard to imagine he felt anything other than deep love for his wife in doing so. But still, what has gone on before is not changed, and Joe and Eva are not saved. In short, strong stories will always instigate some sort of reaction or change, but to assume that this alteration will always be good, or to map them on any kind of good-bad binary at all, is to underestimate the power of fiction. Yes, the characters of Chris Power attempt to use stories as an antidote to loneliness, but that’s not to say every effort is redemptive or magically healing. Indeed, sometimes it is actively counterproductive, the stories growing into new, deeper sources of loneliness that grip a soul and refuse to let go. Fiction, it turns out, is not some therapeutic balm. Rather, it is something that can help and hinder, soothe and scorch, and in doing so, be as nuanced and complicated as life itself.

Mothers is out now via Faber, and you can follow Chris Power on Twitter.

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While there are no schools or ruled paper in the Alexandra Kleeman’s short story collection, Intimations, this feeling is perhaps the closest we’re going to get in any attempt to describe the surreal, anxiety-dream atmosphere stretched across the book. Be they bizarre fables or straighter realist narratives, Kleeman’s stories are imbued with an overarching strangeness. Indeed, many of the characters seem to be facing an exam of one sort or another, though the stakes are raised by their confusion as to what exactly is being measured, by whom, and to what end.

The collection is split into three sections, categorised in the press release as “birth, living, and death.” The first opens with ‘Fairy Tale’, a nightmare in which the narrator’s home is besieged by fiancés and boyfriends, past, present and potential. Her parents look on, as though expecting her to select one, though when she does the piece unravels, chaos disintegrating into a fine, single thread of logic that only she cannot decipher. ‘The Dancing-Master’ is equally unsettling, featuring the titular Dancing Master and his captive-like student trying to perfect his body in motion, while ‘Lobster Dinner’, is an absurd, devious take on the love story, featuring killer lobsters and killing lobsters and lobster-based recipes from summer on the Cape. Strangeness squared, ‘A Brief History of Weather’ closes the section with the most peculiar piece in the collection. Logic obscured as if by a stormy front, the story is either hieroglyphic or pareidolic, as though arriving in neat images and channelled through Kleeman’s pen unedited, arranged according to the direction of the wind or else blind chance.

The majority of the stories in the second section concern a narrator named Karen, though we are left to guess if the Karens are the same person or linked in any way at all. Here Kleeman pivots in a realist direction, the peculiarity left to haunt the spaces between what the characters try to say and what they manage to communicate. ‘Choking Victim’ sees a well-meaning mother grow irrational through neurotic concern, while ‘Jellyfish’ finds a newly-engaged couple at an unnerving holiday resort, seemingly unable to enjoy their milestone. This is made clear by the state of the sea, so chock-full of the Cnidarians of the title that swimming is not possible. “The effect of so many small, identical details multiplied and extended into the far distance was nightmarish,” Kleeman writes. “An optical illusion made suffocatingly real.”

There’s an alienation present in ‘I May Not Be the One You Want, But I Am the One For You’, though cleverly registered as the opposite—Karen, having been isolated from human contact, is the ‘normal’ one, and now suddenly aware of the fundamental oddness of other people, the way they live and breathe and lick their lips, fleshy machines we can never really know. The isolation, it seems, is both the cause and the coping mechanism, the reason the people in her cafe appear so strange and the attempt at escaping into something more digestible. Instead she flees to entertainment in which narrative arcs are followed and people represent simplified ideals of viewers choice.

“She felt thick-brained and inept at the delicate choreography of being nice to people. She had been watching two movies a day, sometimes more. There were almost enough movies around to live your entire life in them. But there was not quite enough.”

The closing section opens with the fancy-dress-faux-pas-turns-murder-mystery of ‘Fake Blood’, where guests at a party debate the relative realism of the killings taking place around them (“But what does real look like?” someone asks). ‘Hylomorphosis’ is Kleeman at her most experimental and abstract, never quite materialising into anything tangible, and ‘Rabbit Starvation’ juxtaposes the fluffiness of white cotton with some hideously dark existential force. Finally, there’s an apocalypse of vanishing objects, ‘You, Disappearing’, which echoes Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. Here is perhaps where Kleeman’s intent becomes clearest, the tale becoming a melancholic love story as represented by absences, and our inability to see them coming.

“The apocalypse was quiet. It had a way about it, a certain charm. It could be called graceful. It was taking a long time.”

Intimations is out now via Harper Perennial and available in all the usual place. Also, be sure to check out Kleeman’s debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine.

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— Noah Cicero, The Human War

There’s a push and pull at work at the heart of Noah Cicero’s debut novella, equal and opposite forces born of the distant, nebulous nature of global events. Collected into his debut 2003 release alongside two short stories, The Human War follows twenty-something Mark on the night the invasion of Iraq began (“Two hours till war. / It’s six o’clock. Bush said at eight, people must die”). War is not just imminent but live on TV—the journalistic speculation whetting appetites, Bush’s rhetoric something like the tagline of a trailer, the idea of war familiar enough to invoke anger yet abstract and removed enough to feel unreal, something possible to ignore.

In his lower-class existence in Youngstown, Ohio, Mark finds himself paralysed by this dichotomy, unsure whether to scream in protest or forget himself in cheap drink and empty sex. Whether to join the fight just to shock some life into his nerves and bones. As such, the book operates on two speeds or levels. The terse, tumbling prose captures Mark’s awareness of all this line by line, confusion and disillusionment and anger against the futility of it all, while zoomed out the structure of the narrative is a glacial, directionless slide. While internally thrashing and grasping in search of answers, it translates to nothing more than inertia, one pleasureless drift through strip joints and bars, sharing the company of friends he doesn’t know and girls he both loves and doesn’t.

“When I die, there better be a heaven, because I want an answer for this.”

The Human War is out now on Fugue State Press (US) and Snowbooks (UK). Noah Cicero’s latest work, the poetry collection, Bipolar Cowboy, was released in 2015 on Lazy Fascist Press.

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— Joseph Scapellato, ‘Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Lovers’

Through a careful give and take between familiar imagery and surrealist flourishes, Joseph Scapellato’s debut collection Big Lonesome is a subversive love letter to The Wild West, skewing archetypes just enough to subvert the myths and tropes of the genre. Split into three sections– ‘Old West’, ‘New West’ and ‘Post-West’– the book stretches the notion of The West into the present and beyond, resulting in twenty-five stories of considerable variation that nonetheless hang upon the All-American themes of individualism, identity and history.

Unsurprisingly, ‘Old West’ is the most traditional of the segments, though this is not to say Scapellato plays it straight. ‘Big Lonesome Beginnings’ sets the tone, a story centred on a saunter of cowboys, one armed with a guitar in place of an absent Her, the others forcing themselves to stay awake so as not to miss what the music has them feeling. “He knew his music would never be a body,” Scapellato writes, “but he played it nonetheless.” From here we are introduced to cowboys of all shapes and sizes, from the eponymous centaurian hero of ‘Horseman Cowboy’ to the puny cowboy of ‘Mutt-Face’ who attempts (unsuccessfully) to drink himself big, each character representing some spin on the masculine mystique of Western mythology. One standout is ‘Thataway’, where a hard-luck cowboy lives in fear of a ‘rile’ which rises within him and (worse) the ‘weepies’ which sometimes follow. Sitting in a laundromat, he meets an odd old man who speaks of the ‘brown boy’ who climbs down throats and hugs hearts but ultimately abandons you. The story grows increasingly hallucinatory, the old man growing more strange and the brown boy manifesting physically. The cowboy comes to learn that beneath his fear of his emotions lies a deeper dread, a dark dead absence that grins behind the early promise of narcotic relief.

“Most nothings showed up where a something used to be, and the gone something was what you used to measure the nothing. This nothing had come from where there had never been anything. There was no telling how much of him it would require, and for how long, and to what end. It was much worse than the weepies” (23).

The jewel at the centre of ‘Old West’ is ‘Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Loves’, a piece split into subheadings detailing either a true love (“His First”, “His Second”, etc.) or other notable and metaphorically-ripe events from the cowboy’s life. His first three loves are women—a singing whore, a blushing teacher, a star-crossed senorita—but the fourth is a radio. Finding the cowboy in his old age and sharing wistful wisdom with a local kid (“Music don’t make the world smaller. Just makes you bigger.”), this final section paints loneliness in its true light, comprehensive and all-consuming yet also surprisingly feeble, a force that feels like the default state right up until it is no longer. The result is a Saunders-like sense of compassion and empathy, love appearing at irregular intervals to slap Good Stuff in the face and help him see clearly for however long it lasts.

“The way he saw it, love had always come to him like a thing remembered. Known and new. And now the radio! It received what it was given, and what it received it gave. It gave to those who gathered round. What was far was now” (36).

‘New West’ drags us forward into something like the present day, where the cowboys are still cowboys, yet ones reared on the Western myth. As such, it’s impossible to tell whether this West is one big performance or something intrinsic in the American spirit, loneliness and self-destruction made halfway gratifying by the knowledge of those already lost to the curse, by a nostalgia for something that was never quite yours. Again, the stories range from the mundane to the fantastic, the latter typified by ‘Cowgirl’, where a human female born of a cow traverses life in strange detachment, thoughts and feelings arriving and dissipating without warning, her mind clouded (or not) by a bovine thoughtlessness. ‘A Mother Buries a Gun in the Desert Again’ is a pretty literal expansion of the title, charting the slow sadness of ageing and steady surrender to liquid distractions, while ‘Small Boy’ serves as a direct challenge of the whole Heroic Western trope, asking a variety of people a simple question with the forthright innocence only found in young children. “Why did we kill all the Indians?”

Closing story ‘Snake Canyon’ has a Jon Raymond/Kelly Reinhardt vibe, finding two friends retreating to the wilderness as a salve against day-to-day life. “The air was clean and dry, but flush with the feeling they’d come for,” Scapellato writes. “An emptying out: an emptying in. A reminder that they were made out of their bodies” (95). Disaster strikes, as one of the men gets so badly injured the other must to carry him down the mountain, and the heart of the New West experience is revealed. Having a weird out-of-body experience, the man sees himself saving his friend’s life. At first, he is filled with pride at the vision, though doubts soon creep in as he wishes he was stronger and more confident in his life-saving ability. Finally, he turns to anger, furious at an imagined audience judging his every action, seeing his act of heroism in its less-than-glorious detail, recognising him not as a Western hero but a fallible human. The idea that the truth of the Old West was equally human/cowardly lurks at the back of the story, a vague awareness of some self-imposed amnesia, a blurring of the truth.

“By intentionally or unintentionally overlooking history, American communities could choose to shape and be shaped by imagined futures that, at least initially, appeared untouched by American mistakes, by American embarrassments. Freedom in forgetting” (96-7)

If ‘New West’ is a contemporary West, then ‘Post-West’ is a contemporary Midwest, representing another step away from American history toward the imagined futures referenced above. Still, the characters here seem just as lost, either dizzied by their new-found freedom or else confused by some looming strangeness, as though history lurks just out of view, a gigantic body disrupting the normal forces of life. ‘It Meant There Would Be More’ is one such example, a story examining a couple and their life within an apartment complex where communication feels subtly impossible, every interaction a thin skin atop of a deep recess of fear and feeling.

I took her hand, the one with the keys. I talked about what we were and what we could be.
She took back her hand. “When you talk about us you don’t mean what you say.
“I mean it now.”
“Exactly. That’s it, that’s all” (122).

Focusing on a man who takes his fiance’s dog to a bar, ‘Dead Dogs’ follows a similar vein, the canine triggering a series of patrons to approach with tales of the own, long deceased pets. One-sided and almost entirely for their own benefit, their stories are more like soliloquies, Evan Dara-like monologues whose natural cadences mask a broader sadness. Again the sense is one of stilted communication, people with this urgent need to share what’s inside their heads yet either too embarrassed to do so or else finding words and phrases insufficient, the message degraded upon contact with air. ‘Company’ confronts this head on, with a person trying to get another to talk, or at least know they can should they feel so inclined. The story progresses to a suicide attempt, the sense of danger sharpening the narrator’s plea:

“You’re no addict brother, you’re not insane, you haven’t been beaten or abused or abandoned. You’re okay! You’re okay, so what is it, what is it always, and why have we only ever talked around it?” (174)

What’s striking about ‘Company’, and indeed the majority of the collection, is the push and pull of the past. “I can’t stop plunging my head into the past,” the narrator says, “even though it’s hard to breathe in” (170). Here, times gone are both something to escape and retreat into, to remember and forget, questions and answers and warnings all rolled into one. They come with lessons we’d do well to learn, expectations we’d do well to ignore. Ultimately, Big Lonesome paints the past as something that can destroy us, and as something that could save our souls.

Big Lonesome is out now via Mariner Books, and you can head to the Joseph Scapellato website for more info on the author.

The lure of making a companion mixtape for this one proved just too much. Just like the collection, we’ve broken the playlist into three distinct sections.

Tracklisting:

“Old West”

1) The Rev. J.M. Gates – Death’s Black Train is Coming
2) Ken Maynard – The Lone Star Trail
3) Bascom Lamar Lunsford – Dry Bones
4) Uncle Dave Macon – Walking in the Sunlight
5) Blind Lemon Jefferson – See That My Grave is Kept Clean
6) Harry Jackson – Some Cowboy Brag Talk

“New West”

7) Andrew Weathers Ensemble – You Are Powerful We Are Taking Over
8) Fog Lake – I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
9) Sawtooth – Dead Dog Eyes
10) Jordan O’Jordan – A Lonely Road
11) The Dead Tongues – Stained Glass Eyes
12) Ben Seretan – Cottonwood Tree

“Post West”

13) Frederick Squire – Old Times Past New Times
14) Dear Nora – The Lonesome Border, Pt. 1
15) Phosphorescent – A New Anhedonia (Live On KEXP)
16) YOWL – Saturday Drag
17) Advance Base – Nephew in the Wild
18) Talons’ – Change

Photo From the Joseph Scapelatto Website / Cover (re)design by Liam Doyle

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