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 »

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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 »

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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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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 »

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It takes a nineteenth-century Ukrainian author like Nikolai Gogol (author of the novels “Taras Bulba” and “Dead Souls” and stories “The Overcoat” and “The Nose”) to put a Slavic turn on the title “The Night Before Christmas,” which conjures merry yuletide memories for Americans.

Here, instead of St. Nicholas, it is the devil who appears on Christmas Eve: “It was only from the goat-beard under his chin, from the little horns sticking upon his forehead, and from his being no whiter than a chimney-sweep, that one could tell that he was not a German or a district attorney, but simply the devil, who had one last night left him to wander about the world and teach good folk to sin.” Read the rest of this entry »

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At two decades’ remove from the Cold War, we Westerners can only imagine how Drago Jancar’s masterful, picaresque “The Galley Slave” must have resonated with his fellow Slovenians trapped behind the Iron Curtain when the novel was released in 1978. A Polish friend of mine who was a member of Solidarity once told me that Communism was a “crime” in which people were ruled by what were in effect gangsters.

In locating roaming protagonist Johan Ot in a Slovenia trembling on the brink of modernity, the author finds historical circumstances in which the proper human response is paranoia; in fact it is the only effective defense mechanism. As the saying goes, it’s not really paranoia when they’re actually out to get you, and “they” are certainly out to get Johan Ot. In his world, all is madness. Read the rest of this entry »

Written in 1989, the complete typescript for “The Third Reich” was discovered in Roberto Bolaño’s papers after his death in 2003. More poetic and captivating than his later tale of crime, suspense and corruption set on the Costa Brava (“The Skating Rink”), “The Third Reich” holds the seed of poetry and depravity that is representative of Bolaño’s work and would eventually culminate in “2666.” It is indeed a seed, bordering on a novella and using the more perplexing but also less ambitious format of a diary. Serialized in four parts this year in the Paris Review, the 288-page novel is narrated day-by-day by a socially inept but quietly perceptive German board-game player, Udo Berger. Read the rest of this entry »

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Anne Enright, an Irish writer of luminous family intricacies, explores the trajectory and minuscule tragedy of an affair between married people in “The Forgotten Waltz.” The story is told in retrospect by the errant heroine, Gina, who begins by saying, “If it hadn’t been for the child then none of this might have happened, but the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive,” referring to her lover’s daughter, an ill child, who is over-coddled and mostly unlikeable. Enright’s book isn’t about the excitement of an affaire de’coeur but rather the dreary, everyday occurrence of relationships ruined. As Gina reveals the beginning (and what appears to be the end) of her relationship with Seán to the reader, we’re drawn into this relatively simple story of exquisite characterization. She excels when delving into the pain and love that exists between family members, sibling rivalry, and complex relationships with parents, as in her Man Booker-prize-winning book, “The Gathering.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Even if “Stella!” is all you know about Tennessee Williams’ plays, a new edition of “The Glass Menagerie” coinciding with the late Mississippian’s hundredth birthday should persuade you that something monumental was occurring in theater in Chicago on December 26, 1944.

That evening—while on the other side of the world German combat divisions were hurling themselves at the battered and beleaguered U.S. 101st Airborne at Bastogne—the Civic Theatre was mounting the premiere of Williams’ pre-war-set, very interior drama “The Glass Menagerie.”

Just as the face of the world would be changed by the ensuing rollback of the Nazis’ last desperate military offensive, “Menagerie” marked a quieter but nonetheless dramatic shift in theater. Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) reports that not only was “Menagerie” Williams’ first great success, but argues indisputably that it raised expectations for Williams’ work and for American drama. Read the rest of this entry »