Fomite: 103 books

Charles Rafferty works in miniatures. These short short stories explore the small disasters of desire. They investigate the prob-lems that ensue when, inevitably, his characters get what they wish for and what they deserve. 

Guilt and a desperate need to repent drive the antiheroes in Tom Walker’s dark (and often darkly funny) stories: A gullible journalist falls for the 40-year-old stripper he profiles in a magazine. A faithless husband abandons his family and joins a support group for lost souls. A merciless...

…To look for stories the way we look for rain — out the window, in puddles, signs of movement, contact. A torrent of situations, cascading into heaps of paper, boxes situations…The Way None of This Happened…120 or so prose entries from 40 years of writing…Out there in the nowhere…The sound...

The Empty Notebook began its life as a very literal metaphor for a few weeks of what I thought was writer’s block, but was really the struggle of an eccentric persona to take over my working life. It won. And for the next three years everything I wrote came to me in the voice of the Empty Notebook,...

Reflections on life as the joy of living it slowly chills

Views that inspire, that calm, or that terrify – all come at some cost to the viewer.  In Views Cost Extra you will find a New Jersey high school preppy who wants to inhabit the “perfect” cowboy movie, a rural mailman disgusted with the residents of his town who wants to live...

Shadowboxing with Bukowski tells a bizarro tale of Nicholas Kastinovich, a young bookseller who struggles to keep his bookstore afloat in the harbor town of San Pedro, CA, ostracized by fellow business owners, in a marriage on the rocks, in a town where Charles Bukowski dwells. Pushed to the edge...

When Walter Ratliff is released from jail in lower Manhattan on the eve of the biggest hurricane to ever make landfall in New York City, he returns to his apartment to find Cordelia, the love of his life, has abandoned him, and returned to their hometown of Acheron, Vermont. Bridges, tunnels, and...

In these ten elegantly written short stories, Caitlin Hamilton Summie takes readers from WWII Kansas City to a poor, drug-ridden neighborhood in New York, and from the quiet of rural Minnesota to its pulsing Twin Cities, each time navigating the geographical boundaries that shape our lives as well...

Set in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York—and in places between and beyond—these stories feature characters baffled by where they are in their lives. Several focus on returns—the emotions that roil, the dark secrets that press against the heart. A son attempts to endure a short visit to his parents,...

Hyde lives! (It’s only the well-meaning Jekyll who is dead.) Cloak and cudgel discarded, he is now a suitably smooth operator. But as Mike Tyson observes in the epigraph, “Everybody’s got a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.”