Articles

Olive Kitteridge is fleshy. She eats doughnuts everyday. She offends and is offended easily, and yet she is fragile and sympathetic. This novel, composed of 13 connected stories, presents Crosby, Maine: the accumulation of scars that come with small-town life.

Shane Jones, author of the chapbook, I Will Unfold You With My Hairy Hands (Greying Ghost 2008), and the novel, Light Boxes (Publishing Genius Press 2009), answers a few questions about his forthcoming books, his literary influences, and his favorite sexual position.<

Meet Chay Sump, Lightning Willy, Dixon Forkenbrocks, Hi Alcorn, Shaina Lister and the Devil. Annie Proulx’s characters are wild and creepy, poor and isolated. These are hard lives: they “saddle up, ride, rope, cut, herd, unsaddle, eat sleep and do it again.” Proulx’s humor is morbid and relentless. Laugh and cringe within a sentence.

Jimmy Chen—San Francisco resident, visual artist, and frequent HTMLGIANT contributor—takes time out to answer a few questions about his flash fiction chapbook, Typewriter, which is available for purchase from

These stories span from anonymous sex games in the after-hours clubs of Paris, to Kennedy wannabe politicians trying to avoid scandal, to hostage negotiation in war-torn Kabul, but these characters seem connected.

In a sick and wonderful way, Lowboy notices the details in everything: temperature, sound, light, weight. In just 24 hours, 16-year-old, schizophrenic William Heller (Lowboy) escapes from his asylum, has a near-sexual encounter with a street-woman, sneaks his ex-girlfriend out of school, eludes detectives and tramps all over Manhattan, mostly underground.

You are Billy Poe. You’re also Isaac English, Virgil, Grace, Lee and
Bud Harris. Buell, Pennsylvania is a dying steel town full of people
who either want to escape or spend their time thinking about when they
could have escaped, but no longer can. When Billy and Isaac
accidentally kill a giant homeless Swedish man, they realize how

Tobias Wolff’s characters are creepy, cold and genuine. Only ten of
these thirty stories are brand new, but Wolff prefaces the collection
by saying that he edited some of the older stories, read: they’re all
new, read them again. At the end of each story you’ll wish—for a
moment—that it was longer. Each story is like a wrinkled old man at the

Do what you can to stretch Lush Life out. Twenty or thirty
pages a day. Black coffee. Maybe a fried egg. Let it sink in. Hear the
voices: Detective Clark, Yolanda, Little Dap, Eric Cash, Tristen.
Everyone who has watched The Wire knows that Price knows dialogue. I tend to think crime-novels fall flat after “the big crime,” because they usually do. Lush Life