The notion that “the medium is the message” is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but the folks at Rose Metal Press seek to marry the media to the message with their individually designed, beautifully custom-printed editions of what they describe as “hybrid genres.” The result is books that could seem pricey and precious were it not for the fact that that they offer a perfect match to the right readers. The Brookline, Massachusetts-based (with a strong Chicago presence due to its co-founder’s local residence) publisher’s books aren’t for everyone, and that’s the point: they don’t need to be, considering each so gloriously fits its own highly personal niche.

Consider the appropriately retro fifties packaging of Tiff Holland’s linked short-short stories, at the center of which is a judgmental, far-from-perfect working-class mom dubbed Betty Superman, whose chief “super” virtue may be honesty to the point of bluntness. Read the rest of this entry »

Startups in the teeth of a recession are risky, and new publishing ventures especially so; hence, the premiere of the ambitious, earnest semiannual literary journal “Curbside Splendor” should be applauded. Originating online but based in Logan Square, it is a “city” magazine edited by Victor David Giron that casts a wider net, with stories ranging out into suburban and even exurban interests.

Karolina “Koko” Faber’s design creates an urban and urbane showcase for the stories and poems set beside striking, complementary photography by Garett Holden, Faber and others. It is a journal likewise proud of its writers and poets, placing brief bios in front of their works instead of relegating them to the back of the book.

Issue 1 includes winners from Curbside’s Winter 2010 short-story contest. Brandon Jennings’ first-place flash-fiction piece “Doc the Fifth” draws its power from the immediacy of its description of the Iraq War. Stories in both issues vary from generally straightforward narrative to the near surreal, like James Greer’s “Second-Hand Blue” in Issue 1, which demands and rewards close reading. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Ulysses S. Grant earned applause in the North for his generalship during the Civil War, and even the deep respect of former enemies because of his generosity at the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his hard-fighting, haggard veterans at Appomattox, Virginia.

But the great military hero had no head for business, as he had proven in civilian life between the Mexican and Civil Wars, and again as U.S. President from 1869-1877, in an administration rent by corruption in which he had no hand but which occurred on his watch.

Nonetheless, after years of post-presidential financial uncertainty, he had every reason to believe that he had finally secured a large, comfortable nest egg for his retirement with his beloved wife, Julia. Partner in the apparently successful investment firm Grant & Ward, he went to bed one night in May 1884 thinking himself a near-millionaire only to awaken to find his accounts gutted and himself penniless. Read the rest of this entry »

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Three estranged siblings gather at a funeral parlor in fictional Stone Claw Grove, Michigan, to mourn the grandmother who seemed to find a solace in the hometown that the siblings could not. A man struggles to live outside his father’s shadow after he inherits a nightclub from the old man. A teenage runaway comes to grips with her life as a noir cliché. A preteen copes with puberty in the dilapidated apartment of his guardian.

At its core, Tim Kinsella’s “The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense” is a pretty straightforward Small Town Lives novel: a lot of characters facing obstacles, both internal and external, with the town itself seemingly the biggest among them. You’ve seen this sort of thing before. It’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” It’s Willa Cather. Heck, it’s “Garden State.” Read the rest of this entry »

Civilizations rise and fall, but Harvard University Professor Niall Ferguson has made a virtual cottage industry out of the impending fate of the West in the twenty-first century. In his fifth book in this vein, “Civilization: The West and the Rest,” he measures our current stall against the material advances of the East—especially China—and finds reasons for both alarm and hope.

Twentieth-century historians, including Oswald Spengler, saw regular, rhythmic cycles with specific stages among the world’s civilizations, but Ferguson proposes that science suggests amending that view. Civilizations, he writes, are “complex systems” (like the weather, or more broadly, climate) wherein huge changes may be wrought in a very short time by specific events.

Therein is the reason for alarm: Will the West’s economies right themselves in time after the market catastrophe of 2008 to withstand the rapid economic onslaught of China? If they cannot, “complex systems” suggests the “fall of the West”— currently led by our American “empire”—could be quite precipitous. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A fictional masterpiece of the impending horror of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” Martha Gellhorn’s 1940 “A Stricken Field” is now generally regarded as her finest book. Sadly, she did not see it that way.

A new foreword and her own 1985 afterword to a freshly republished edition show how by making an American journalist—a thinly veiled version of herself—a central character of her novel she was “troubled by a secret shame. I had used two of my own small acts in that tragedy as part of the story. It was not my tragedy and I disliked myself for taking a fictionalized share.”

She felt she had inflated herself at the expense of the many real people she had encountered (and fictionalized) who had shown true heroism in the face of the Nazi machine advancing through Czechoslovakia in 1938. Yet “A Stricken Field” draws its power from the viewpoint of one whom we know must have been a real witness to the telling details that build one upon another to choking, terrifying effect. Read the rest of this entry »

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Like the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” we modern human beings can all use a little courage. In fact, Judith A. and Richard B. Schwartz argue in “The Wounds That Heal” that the need for heroic role models “is so strong that the media will manufacture pseudo-heroes in order to meet it.

“The hero exemplifies traits and demonstrates capabilities… (that) we value,” they write. “He or she extends our conceptions of the possible and helps us to focus on that which is essential rather than peripheral.”

Unfortunately, when we lack true models, we may mistake celebrity for heroism and as humans aspire to notoriety rather than real virtue and character. “The Wounds That Heal” offers guidance out of this particularly modern mess. Read the rest of this entry »

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Patti Smith has garnered plenty of critical acclaim over the past year for “Just Kids,” a memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, but she also quietly published another slender remembrance—”Woolgathering.”

At less than one-hundred pages, with Smith’s own photographs interspersed like religious relics, “Woolgathering” reads like a path through a dream, or the remembrances of a priestess. But Smith claims, in a charming introduction, that it’s truth, not fairy tale. She also endearingly writes that she hopes the book will impose a “vague and curious joy” on the reader, which is a fairly accurate way to describe how the book is absorbed. Read the rest of this entry »

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What if?  “Soo-Ja hoped that upon seeing him again, she’d simply feel the expected warmth and surprise you feel when reunited with an old friend—for that’s what he was in the eyes of the world, a distant friend, the kind you run into at weddings and funerals, once every decade or so. But instead, she felt a piercing sensation in her heart, and her breathing became shallow. Soo-Ja could not run to him—if she couldn’t do that before, why did she think she could do that now?”

At the core of Samuel Park’s remarkable debut novel “This Burns My Heart” is his version of an old story, that of the road not taken and its impact on a human life. But young, bright, ambitious Soo-Ja has to make a choice critical to her future within the patriarchal culture of 1950s and 1960s South Korea, wherein it is almost impossible for a young woman to backtrack and take another turn. Read the rest of this entry »

By Martin Northway

Intermittently fiction tries to reinvigorate itself with new forms. Now we have “flash fiction,” like what we have long called short, short fiction but imbued somehow with greater urgency, nurtured in the hothouse of the Internet blogosphere. Its products are like watermelons stolen by their writers from odd moments in the workaday world or the humdrum of life.

Tobias Bengelsdorf, in his introduction to a compendium of short works that is the newest print project of Chicago’s Green Lantern Press, makes no apology for his own transgressions against employers, for “Every office I’ve worked in was a den of wasted time and preposterous directives.”

And as with stolen watermelons, flash fiction can be very sweet, including some of these selections gleaned from Fiction At Work’s blog (fictionatwork.com) since its inception in 2007. At their best, they yield unexpected glimpses into other lives. Read the rest of this entry »