Brief Reviews of New or New(ish) Books
By Valerie Fox
Patricia Q. Bidar
Wild Plums (novelette)
ELJ Editions, 2024
Patrica Q. Bidar’s Wild Plums paints a vivid portrait of a young woman seeking to turn her life around and make a new start in a new place. Still exhausted following the death of her mother, Maya leaves San Francisco for a college town with her recently divorced professor-partner. What made me care about Maya are her contradictions–surprising yet true-feeling. She’s confident and self-aware, but also delicate and secretive. Bidar draws us in by close attention to place and detail. We observe as Maya negotiates challenging environments and experiences–life in a small-town; burgeoning connections; getting to know her partner’s daughter. Wild Plums is built around a series of short, flash-like chapters. And like one of the puzzles Maya does to process her grief and fill her time, her character comes into focus gradually. The reader gets a strong sense of accompanying Maya, of really being with her, on this path of self-discovery.
Recent story in Waxwing
Bidar’s website: www.patriciaqbidar.com
Lorette C. Luzajic
The Rope Artist
Mixed Up Media Books, 2023
In The Rope Artist by Lorette C. Luzajic, each short fiction is connected to a specific artist or work of art. The artworks (when named) don’t overwhelm and it isn’t necessary to see them in order to love these stories. Rather, if you find the “source” works, they seem to contain messages or messengers that have somehow been miraculously born in the art of Luzajic’s stories. An alien-like being walks right out of Leonora Carrington’s milieu to have a conversation in bed with the narrator in “Click.” In “The Patio” (after Picasso’s Couple on a Patio), the people-watching narrator draws lessons through eavesdropping. Luzajic has a poet’s gift for confiding. Some stories feature people talking about art or making art. In “Second Hand Roses” (after the photography of Gary Peddle), the young narrator and friends forage junk to sell. Garry (not Gary) takes photographs of “the weirdest things we find and of broken things along the way.” It’s a portrait of formative, wild years, and while there is brokenness, friendship endures. In “Kenophobia,” an art-dealer meets an eccentric composer and then discusses her visit with her husband, provoking surprising insights.
Luzajic’s stories have a formal inventiveness to match their variety of purpose and tone. Importantly, she allows just enough space for us to see the whole of the story along with the parts.
The Mackinaw (founded by Luzajic)
Numerous works from NFFR archives
Keith J. Powell
Sweet Nothings Are a Diary if You Know How to Read Them
ELJ Editions, 2024
The evocative title of Keith J. Powell’s short collection of flash hints at the offbeat quality of these stories and how many are concerned with kinds of intimate talk and with people trying to read and reach each other. Some stories are diary-like in that the moments explored are not over-explained. The moments and characters’ interactions are sometimes raw, sometimes realistic, often funny, and a few times macabre. It’s charming how stories talk to each other (like in a good book of poems or short prose), such as when hands are important in two early stories, “Smile and Wave Goodbye” followed by “Ring Finger.” This happens also when characters recur, adding to a sense of them being in different configurations drifting from difficult childhoods through lonesome young adulthoods. I always trust the writing, that these stories needed to exist in their short forms. The last two stories here, the title story and “Red Light,” are among many in the collection full of sweetness and heart.
Recent fiction at Fractured Lit
Your Impossible Voice (co-founded by Powell)
Robert Shapard
Bare Ana and Other Stories
Regal House Publishing, 2025
Shapard’s wide-ranging collection explores transformation and discovery. When the stories are grim, the characters still enchant. When people are falling in love, we’re shown the sticking and turning points. The settings vary considerably but most share an out-of-time quality: a family vacation, on a plane, a fairy tale, a marital fling, being between jobs, almost graduating college, and other in-between spaces. In stories ranging from very short to longer (for flash), characters’ lives get built up, pulled apart, broken, renovated. Shapard pulls us in, as in “Thomas and Charlie,” drawing us into the head of a child in the backseat of the family Buick, remembering the sounds of the highway and seeing the glow at night of his feckless parents’ cigarettes. In “Zika,” we share Felicity’s mild transgression (reading a stranger’s journal on a plane) and follow her as she gains increasing clarity as she faces her future. Shapard’s characters consistently make marks on their landscapes and are marked by them. In these pages, also, we come to see that caring is possible, if not inevitable. That’s a mark these stories may well leave on any attentive reader.
Interview in SmokeLong Quarterly
Shapard’s website: robertshapard.com
