Tag Archives: gritty literary fiction

Editorial by Arthur Graham

Posted on by

The following is my editorial of Arthur Graham’s Editorial (Bizarro Press Edition,  149 pages).
The following (edited) definitions of editorial are from Dictionary.com:

noun — an article presenting the opinion of the editor.

Whoever the editor is–the unnamed narrator, a young orphan who remembers “days of reading and masturbating in my room” but doesn’t remember, at the time of telling, what his age was (17 or 28)–is dumped by auntie and uncle into the cruel sea of the outside world with his heavy burden, a suitcase filled with dirty magazines. The narrator assumes that the reader is surprised: Continue reading →

The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive by Vanessa Libertad Garcia

Posted on by

Vanessa Libertad Garcia’s first book, The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive (Fiat Libertad Co., 92 pages), is a slim volume  of 23 short pieces, some of them poems, many of them first-person or third-person vignettes that capture a few minutes or hours of a given character’s “despicable, embarrassing, or repulsive” life.

Gritty and unflinching, the tone of the book is one of desperation and starkness as each character depicted—Marta, a young, disenchanted lesbian; or Diaz Diaz, a gay fashion designer, for example—speaks to us of their heartbreak, alienation, and sometimes of suicidal plans. The personas that Garcia invokes are products of a society that is too fast-paced, too materialistic, and too shallow for twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings trying to find a meaningful niche in life, as they struggle simultaneously to pay bills, be successful in a career, find true love, or simply forge a connection to someone or something outside of themselves that can make their lives fulfilling. Welcome to the underbelly of Los Angeles. Continue reading →

The Suburban Swindle by Jackie Corley

Posted on by

With The Suburban Swindle (So New Books, 99 pages) Jackie Corley delivers a collection of memoir-like stories about drunk, pissed-off, reckless, late-teen and twenty-something Jersey suburbanites fucking up relationships and getting the shit beat out of them. The narrative voice, sensibly consistent throughout the collection and rising to a kind of tortured literariness, wedges a space between author-narrator (who is destined to get the hell out of there) and subjects (who aren’t going anywhere). The narrator is an outsider-in-the-making, not quite not-one-of-them yet, but well on her way. Throughout this collection, the language is kicking violently against the box it finds itself in, rebelling like a young suburbanite, trying to find its meaning. It’s angry and frustrated: Continue reading →

The Suburban Swindle by Jackie Corley

Posted on by

Jackie Corley’s The Suburban Swindle (So New Publishing, 100 pages ) paints a specific place in a specific time with a specific aesthetic in a timeless style which transcends narrative mode and delivers a straight-served good story. Short works bound together through an ultimately honest, sometimes naïve narrator showcase Corley’s ability to communicate what it is to be a young, smart, bored person in the suburban life, which in its own way at times, reads as surprisingly feminist. Continue reading →