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All Told
All Told is a big, loose, lived-in gathering of poems that tracks a whole life, not in a straight line, but in loops of memory, travel, politics, love, and aging. Kenne starts by greeting the reader in a plain kitchen where “the beans are simmering in the pot” and cornbread is in the pan, then moves through childhood on the Gulf Coast, work on farms and in gins, long nights in bars, years in Mexico and Turkey, and into late-life classrooms and quiet rooms where the poet waits for the phone to ring. Sections like “South,” “The Scene Today,” “In a Country of Cars,” “The Art of Facing Oneself as a Ghost,” “The Way of the Fool,” “All Told,” and “I’m in Your Hands” give the book a loose arc from place and family toward wider public life and finally back to intimate friendships and love. The whole thing feels like a story told over many long evenings.
I enjoyed how sturdy and grounded the writing feels. Kenne likes real rooms, real weather, real work. In “This House” he watches the “gray ghost” of his father ride a lawnmower past mesquite and blue norther wind, then lets time jump so the same house lifts and settles in summer heat. The language stays simple. The images do the heavy lifting. A poem about a timing chain in a car, a night shift, or a mechanic’s bad news turns into a little parable about fear and delay without any fuss. His long piece “Smitty, Wallace and Me” circles around a neighbor rewiring his stereo and Wallace Stevens on the bookshelf, and somehow it becomes a quiet essay on communication, performance, and the way our “systems” of living barely touch each other. I liked the relaxed, talky tone. It never felt like the poems were trying to impress me. They just kept showing me things until I started to care.
I also liked how wide the book opens out into the world. Kenne writes beautifully about Istanbul, standing at his window over the Bosporus while birds spin like white confetti and traffic roars across the bridge, and he slides from that scene into music, Turkish poets, and the weird parade of late-century life. The poems in “The Scene Today” and “In a Country of Cars” keep running this line between wonder and annoyance, affection and disgust, as he watches consumer culture, car culture, war memorials, and election years roll past. There is real bite in titles like “America, You Son-of-a-Bitch,” “Election Year,” and “Against Monotheism,” yet the poems almost always come back to one human voice, tired and worried, trying to stay honest inside all that noise. The long sequence about “The Fool” lets him poke fun at himself and at power in mythic language, but underneath the jokes I heard real loneliness, a man who says his main power now is to sit, wait, and be “an empty room / waiting for you to walk in,” and I felt that in my gut.
Under the craft and the travel and the politics, the book feels tender. The early section “South” holds family ghosts, drought, letters from his mother, and awkward boyhood memories. Later on, in “I’m in Your Hands,” he turns toward teaching, old students, old friends, love poems, and a cat named Kestane who becomes a way to think about God. The tone softens without losing edge. I felt a steady ache running through these later poems, but also a kind of rough gratitude. The book accepts confusion and keeps talking anyway. I found that comforting.
All Told is better taken in sections, like a long road trip with stops in little towns, diners, and old neighborhoods. I would recommend it to readers who like narrative, place-rich poetry, to people who grew up in or around the American South, to anyone who has lived abroad and still feels torn between worlds, and to teachers and writers thinking about their own long haul. If you want clear, humane, often funny, often bruised poems that let you sit in the room with a working poet and see what a whole life looks like from the inside, this book is worth your time.
Pages: 193 | ASIN : B0FRB1W1WD
Unnecessary Hurt and Confusion
Faithless Friends and Replacement Lovers is a collection of short stories about the messy, complicated, and sometimes sweet intersections of love, loss, loyalty, and self-discovery. The title is striking. What does “faithless” mean to you in the context of these stories?
To me, being faithful means you’re devoted and true to another person, despite the obstacles that inevitably arise, and you learn how to communicate and work those things out. By contrast, faithless means you give priority to your inner confusion, uncertainty, or misguided desires, which means you stop acting and communicating in honesty and goodness where the other person is concerned.
For example, in the story Faithless Friends and Replacement Lovers, Tracy was faithless in the way she suddenly checked out instead of communicating why she no longer intended to be friends with Connie. A lot of people do that today, never giving a friendship or relationship another chance, but just “ghosting” and moving on. It creates a lot of unnecessary hurt and confusion. How can friendships and relationships continue unless each person is willing to be honest and challenge themselves to grow in love?
Several characters mistake loyalty for obligation or desire for love. Why do you think that confusion is so common?
Broadly speaking, who can truly know the human heart except for its Maker? At the same time, I’ve found that my understanding of my own motives has grown and matured over the years, so I imagine that is true for everyone, whether for good or for bad.
For example, in Sweet Vengeance, the main character thinks she has loved a certain rich fellow since high school, when she actually lusts after his lavish lifestyle and cares nothing for the man himself. Unless she comes to an awakening of what true love is, it’s doubtful that she will ever have his best interests in mind.
The reality is that all of us come to the table with our own experiences and expectations about love and loss, which makes communication often confusing and challenging. The best thing we can do is acknowledge the differences and constantly seek to learn how to be our best selves to the people around us.
Are there particular stories you feel change meaning depending on a reader’s life experience?
Of course, and the stories have even changed for me over the past decade since I wrote them. Since I often write to process my own experiences or what I see in other people’s lives, I look back at the majority of my stories with a better understanding. I expect others to view them differently as well, based on where they are in life. My favorite part is that readers often bring a completely new understanding, teaching me additional things that I never would have recognized without their fresh perspective.
What did writing this collection teach you about relationships?
Writing these stories taught me a lot of things over the years, and still gives me new insight to this day. For example, I have learned a lot about the diversity of human experiences and the necessity to both be more strict in some things (like setting personal boundaries) and also be a lot more relaxed in other areas (like not needing to explain myself or be fully understood by others). Looking back, the biggest lesson I see is how time truly does change perspectives and experiences. I wouldn’t say it heals all things, but it helps us handle the pain of love and loss.
For example, Silvia and Jed no longer come to mind, but losing Tracy occasionally still brings me grief. Meanwhile, Luigi did not turn out to be who I expected, but then again, I am a completely different person today as well. As long as each of us remains humble and teachable, love and loss will only shape us into better people who are more capable of loving others who join us on the journey of life.
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From the multi-award-winning fiction author Elizabeth Horst, this collection of short stories is meant to inspire you and provoke you to think about the different kinds of relationships and friendships that we all face.A fanciful knight acts upon his romantic notions when journeying to battle.
A successful career woman fears bumping into her long-lost best friend at their college reunion.
A young man seeks his own way where life, women, and religion intersect.
An Italian maiden considers giving up love forever by devoting herself to the convent.
And more!
Hovering between whimsical and philosophical, these fourteen tales feature realistic characters who face varied challenges with love and relationships while deciding for themselves whether to be fleeting and false or faithful and true. For all of us who wish for our own happily ever after, it’s a wonderful and timeless collection that will touch your heart and soul.
Breaking All the Rules
Bad Americans: Part I is a collection of interconnected short stories that follow 12 strangers who gather in a billionaire’s Hamptons mansion to date, compete, and tell stories during the summer of 2020 and the COVID pandemic. What was the inspiration for this book?
The inspiration actually started almost 25 years ago, in 2001. Right after the 9/11 attacks, I moved from New York City to the UK to study abroad at the University of Oxford. Right across from my College, Wadham, was Blackwell’s Bookshop, and sometimes I would explore books there. I started reading The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, in depth. I had already read The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, in high school, and in general, I really liked the exciting, satirical works of the past. At the time, I was also experimenting with narrative forms and basing them on the ancient and classic works I was reading. For my Fiction Workshop Tutorial, I tried to write a story within a story, but it didn’t go so well. I thought that one day I would have the narrative skill to do this–to one-up Boccaccio and Chaucer and write a frame novel with short stories where each reflected and reinforced the other, and our time.
So fast forward to 2019, I was finishing up the editing of The Dance Towards Death, the third book in The Brotherhood Chronicle, which was coming out in September 2020, and I started thinking about the next book in The Human Tragedy, my panoramic portrait of American society in short stories, the modern version of Balzac’s Human Comedy. The first volume, Good Americans (2013), was a highly provocative and challenging short story collection that definitely did progress its form, but it was also rather conventional in its basic structure. So I thought to myself, how do I one-up that? And that’s when I thought back to my original challenge from 2001. I already had 4 books under my belt, each with a different aesthetic or narrative challenge, so I figured I was up to the great task of writing a novel containing stories that worked both ways: as a novel and a short story collection. I came up with a basic sketch of 10 Americans quarantined in an academic library during a pandemic. Each day they would interact, and each night one would tell a story.
Then the pandemic actually hit us. In late January 2020, I became extremely sick and had to cancel my trip to SE Asia. NYC shut down, my parents got sick, and neighbors died. My mom was on the frontlines. And I followed everything that was happening. I saw the rich were moving to the Hamptons to escape, just like in The Decameron. And there were breadlines on the streets of Queens, riots in Manhattan. Assaults on Asian-Americans, a disproportionate toll on People of Color, especially frontline workers. Rhetoric about immigrants. So I realized, as someone who was dedicated to realism in my works as it was, that I had all the material in front of me for Bad Americans. I just needed to do background research, and eventually, after the first draft, get some opinions on the stories and the characters telling them. The setting moved to The Hamptons, I invented all the characters, and wrote a massive first draft, both frame narrative and individual stories. I got feedback on the individual stories from people I trusted who might have similar backgrounds. Some of the stories, and to a lesser extent, character details, changed a bit, though not dramatically. And the frame narrative just needed to be condensed, which I eventually did after successive drafts.
With twelve major voices, how did you keep each character distinct? Did any character surprise you as you wrote them?
It just happened, I don’t know. I did initially write a bunch of character sketches. There were a lot of details about each character in the first draft that were discarded in future drafts, and there were some concerns by beta readers early on about the characters’ needs and motivation to be in The Getaway. But in general, the characters stayed consistent and dimensional. All my books feature tons of characters, and each is multi-faceted yet vivid, so that wasn’t difficult per se. It’s just the way my imagination works. So I could already picture them all from the beginning.
I’m not sure any of the characters really surprised me. I guess my main dilemma was how to portray the billionaire Olive Mixer. The popular choice would be to make him into some evil rich person, a la Squid Game or something. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make him dimensional and human too. He has his reasons for creating The Getaway, like each guest has for being there. Of course, he is Big Brother here, but nevertheless, he didn’t need to be overly evil or anything. Same thing with Taylor, or Ricard, or even Lisa and Hayley. They all have their good and bad sides. They might annoy you, but that just makes them more human and realistic.
The book doesn’t shy away from political and cultural clashes. What risks did you feel you were taking?
The whole book is a risk, as is all my work. So I figured, as long as we are breaking all the rules, we might as well go all the way. Of course, it’s basically prohibited to have political and, to a lesser extent, cultural clashes in mainstream literary fiction. With the latter, especially when you have someone of a particular cultural background, according to the unwritten rules, you can only write about that group. The truth is, we live in a cross-cultural society, especially in Queens, NY, so that’s absurd, especially if you’re trying to portray reality, and it also highly dilutes the possibilities of narrative content and form.
And really, the extent to which contemporary politics should play a role in the book’s conflicts was a dilemma for me early on. Other than being against the grain, I was also worried that such references would make the book feel dated for someone reading it 20 or 40 years from now. But I decided that if I was really going to make a realistic portrait of the time, there’s no way I could shy away from it. That was one of the major fault lines of the time, as it is today. So I embraced it, at least early in the book.
Each guest’s story changes how the group sees them. What does the book suggest about the power of storytelling itself?
We tell ourselves and each other stories all the time, and this is especially true in trying circumstances, especially when a bunch of people are forced to be together. But the short story collection has become a rather staid form. Everyone knows how a collection of stories is going to be structured at a basic level, even if it’s a novel-in-stories, like Winesburg, Ohio, and many books like it onwards (Olive Kitteridge, for example). And usually, we know that each individual story is going to end with some sense of character revelation. So one strength of having frame characters tell the stories is that it makes them and us see these stories as a dynamic, fluid, and even questionable form. Unless we have an unreliable narrator, to some extent, each story in a traditional collection is given somewhat holy and unimpeachable status. But you wouldn’t give that status to a story your barber or Uber Driver told you. Even while being thoroughly engaged and entertained, you would question its authenticity and its objectivity, wouldn’t you? So, on a basic level, that’s what the book is trying to get at: storytelling at its rawest and most realistic form.
Now, transfer that rawness to the immediacy and tensions of the pandemic, and you see the true power of storytelling emerge, which is the haunting effect of portraying the basic struggles of life: life and death, love and loss, privilege and want. And apply it specifically to characters from different walks of life quarantined in a mansion, and now you have a third dimension, which is context. The characters know each other on a basic level, many of them might even want to date each other, but they don’t necessarily trust each other, or know the context of their lives or positions. Now you are questioning and portraying, but you are also revealing. And you are seeing a picture of the lives of others who are not in the mansion either.
So each character has an objective for each story, each reveals themselves in each story, but not necessarily in the way they want to, and perhaps they have a different goal for each character listening. And the other characters will see them through a mix of their preconceived notions, and how they’ve been convinced or changed by the story in question. It’s an endlessly complex equation you can go over and over. Which is the point of the exercise.
So I think the book demonstrates the immense power of storytelling and also the complexities of the motivations of narratives told.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Bad Americans | Good Americans Collection | Tejas Desai | Website | Amazon
Winner of Bestsellers World Reviewers Choice Award in Short Story/Anthology (1st Place)
Critics and Readers Rave: “A Timeless Masterpiece” “A Landmark Literary Event” “A Genre-Defying Tour De Force” “A Masterpiece of Literary Fiction” “A Moral Reckoning” “A Panoramic Portrait of the American Experience” “A Literary Time Capsule and a Mirror” “Fearless, Thought-Provoking, and Utterly Absorbing” “A Must Read”
Summer 2020: the Covid-19 Pandemic is raging. A reclusive billionaire, Olive Mixer, calls twelve diverse & lonely Americans to his mansion complex in the Hamptons: nurses, lawyers, mechanics, social workers, students, financial analysts, soldiers, Uber drivers, engineers, hair salon operators. During the day, the guests meet, compete, date, dine, flirt and fight. Each night, one must tell the group a story.
Their tales range widely in subject, style, length and decorum. Many stories respond to each other. They trigger passionate debate and fiery resistance. They change how characters perceive each other and affect the trajectory of the frame narrative. They make us ponder the nature of storytelling itself.
Bad Americans is part Boccaccio and part The Bachelor, but it is a creation all its own. Both a novel and short story collection, Bad Americans is at once a powerful portrait of the American pandemic experience and an examination of narrative itself. Bad Americans: Part I includes the frame narrative and the first six stories. Bad Americans: Part II will conclude the frame narrative and include six additional stories.
These two books are the second and third volumes of the profound and daring anthology series The Human Tragedy, following the subversive classic Good Americans.
Armando and Maisie
Armando and Maisie is a tender collection of poems that tells the story of a man who lives mostly in the woods of Central Park and the dog who adores him. The book moves through small encounters between the narrator, his dog Maisie, and Armando. Each poem gives another glimpse of Armando’s gentle philosophy, his odd wit, his hardships, and his unwavering affection for animals. The story grows quietly and steadily. It becomes a portrait of friendship, aging, loss, and the strange joy of showing up for another creature again and again.
As I read the book, I kept stopping to feel the weight of its simple lines. The poet uses plain talk, almost casual, yet the emotion sneaks up on you. I felt pulled in by the mix of sweetness and ache. The writing is warm and steady. It never tries to impress. It just speaks. I liked that. I liked how the poems let small moments breathe. A dog leaning her weight on a man. A red cap in the rain. A squirrel sitting like a regular at a bar. These little things hit harder than I expected. They felt honest and felt close to life.
Armando’s thoughts on time, change, or space might sound whimsical at first, but they left me thinking long after. I could feel the poet wrestling with affection for a man who is both joyful and worn down. I could feel his fear as Maisie ages. I could feel that sinking sense when someone doesn’t show up to their usual bench. The poems made me laugh at one moment and swallow hard the next. That swing in feeling gave the book a raw, authentic quality.
By the end, I cared about these two figures in the woods. I cared about the man who feeds the birds and the dog who looks for him, whether he’s there or not. I’d recommend this book to readers who like quiet stories with a lot of heart. Dog lovers will melt. City walkers will recognize the strange intimacy of passing friendships. Anyone who has lost someone, waited for someone, or loved someone in a simple daily way will find something here that settles in and stays awhile.
Pages: 67 | ASIN : B0FPDP4PKL
ENTWINE
ENTWINE sweeps through forests, brooks, moonlit branches, and wingbeats, all woven with a steady pulse of wonder. The book moves through poems and meditations that circle hummingbirds, birches, hawks, seeds, storms, memory, and grief, and it builds a picture of the Hudson Highlands as a living, breathing companion. It feels like a record of attention, a long look at the more-than-human world, and a quiet insistence that our lives thread through soil and water, whether we notice or not. The poems shift between close observation and big feeling, and the book holds everything from scientific detail to spiritual yearning in one continuous braid.
Author Mary Newell writes with this mix of tenderness and excitement that made me lean in and then lean back as if I needed more room to breathe. Some poems rush with energy like the hummingbirds she studies, while others settle into slow, grounded rhythms. I loved that variation. It kept me off balance in a good way. I was wrapped up in her affection for trees and birds and rocks, and then suddenly swept into her grief for lost species or her worry that the land is shifting faster than we can keep up. That emotional jumpiness felt real to me. Life is like that. Beauty and ache and humor all at once. The writing invites that kind of response.
I also found myself reacting strongly to the way she folds her own life into the landscape. Her stories of drought, gardening, watching hawks, losing her mother, or waiting for a familiar hummingbird all cracked open something soft in me. None of it felt forced. I could sense how hard she listens to the world around her and how much she wants to meet it with honesty. Sometimes the imagery felt wild and tangled. Sometimes it hit with a clarity that made me stop reading for a moment so I could feel the point land. I appreciated the intimacy of that.
ENTWINE is perfect for readers who love nature writing that feels alive, for people who enjoy poetry that is tender. If you like work that blends science with feeling or work that welcomes you into the woods and asks you to stay awhile, ENTWINE will be a good companion.
Pages: 94 | ISBN : 1609644921
Final Curtain
Final Curtain is a rich and eerie collection that gathers voices from across time and imagination and sets them wandering through the long shadow of The Phantom of the Opera. Each story pulls a thread from Leroux’s world and spins it into something new. Sometimes it feels dreamy. Sometimes it slips into horror so quietly that you only notice once you’ve already shivered. The book opens with Steve Berman’s thoughtful introduction, setting the stage for the authors’ explorations of obsession, beauty, grief, and the strange spell of performance, and then moves through an eclectic lineup of tales that echo the Phantom’s myth without ever repeating it.
The memoir-style opening by Nadia Bulkin really resonated with me. The voice of the Countess trembles with longing and dread, and I found that mix weirdly relatable. Her fear of mirrors and her slow unraveling got under my skin. I could feel her confusion and her sorrow settling over me as if I were living in that drafty house with her. Other stories came at the Phantom from sideways angles, and that variety kept me on my toes. One moment, the writing felt delicate and sad. The next, it felt sharp and uncomfortable. I liked that. I liked not knowing what emotional corner I’d be pushed into next.
The book’s ideas were intriguing, maybe even more than its plots. So many of the stories are really about the ache of wanting something you can’t have or the way art can consume you before you even realize you’ve handed it your soul. There were times when the writing made me slow down and sit with a feeling for a bit. Some pieces were more lyrical than others, and some wandered off into tonal experiments that didn’t always land cleanly for me, but even when I wasn’t fully connecting, I still admired the nerve of the attempt. I found myself rooting for the writers as much as for the characters.
I’d recommend Final Curtain to readers who enjoy moody stories that riff on classics without getting trapped in imitation. It’s a great pick for anyone who likes gothic atmospheres, emotional messiness, or tales that play with memory, love, and the dark edges of creativity.
Pages: 302 | ASIN : B0G4MWKX56
Passion and Commitment
Creciendo Juntas: Narrativas de Empoderamiento de las Mujeres is an anthology of stories by women sharing their struggles, losses, revelations, and how they have rebuilt their world after significant challenges and changes in their lives. What was the process you used to collect the stories for this collection, and how did you decide which ones to include?
We came into this anthology with a spirit of openness. We were looking for diversity and honesty—to portray women in the rawness of their lives, with no intention other than to state that they are here and that their lives are valuable and rich. In that sense, we allowed the manuscripts we received to shape what the anthology would become. We did not want to preassign any boundaries that might prevent writers from crafting their work from the truth of their own experiences.
In most of the anthologies we’ve produced over our twenty years as publishers, there are specific criteria that must be met for a story to be included. This project was different. Here, it was the writers who shaped the anthology, not us. We deliberately gave up control and entrusted it to those who have lived the experience of being a woman in Latin America, as it should be. The guiding questions were simple: Are you a woman? Are you a writer? Do you understand that literature carries an ethical responsibility not to harm the reader? If so, you were in.
Have you received any feedback from readers that surprised or moved you?
Not directly, but the authors themselves have surprised us with the passion and commitment with which they have embraced, endorsed, and promoted the anthology. I think this speaks volumes about what the project has meant to them and, in turn, to their readers. It has been deeply moving to see how this book has differed from our other publications—it feels like a must-read for everyone.
The promotion of the anthology has not been directed toward a single type of reader, as is often the case with most books. Instead, it has reached across audiences, reinforcing the sense that this is an important work—one readers recognize as necessary. Seeing that response has been incredibly rewarding.
Will you be compiling a second collection of inspirational and motivational stories sharing the enduring spirit of women?
If the context allows for it, and if it once again feels like a necessity—as it did this time, when the first woman president in Mexico was about to assume office, and it felt essential for women to speak about the experience of being women—then it would be both lovely and exciting to do so.
At the same time, we are also interested in pursuing other projects. Women are always present in our work—talented women, talented writers—and that talent extends far beyond inspiration or motivation expressed only through stories explicitly about womanhood. The enduring spirit of women, like any enduring human spirit, is also revealed through creation, through writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, whether the work is about womanhood or about any other aspect of the vast human experience.
So in that sense, yes—we are planning to compile many collections that share the enduring spirit of women. They may not always be explicitly about the experience of being a woman, but they will be a testament to it nonetheless.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Estas son las historias de las mujeres que sustentan el cambio en cada palabra, en cada acción. La revolución también se hace en chiquito, en la cotidianidad, en las victorias y en los errores. En esta antología está escrita la historia del cambio, de cómo nuestras vidas, juntas, se convierten en una epopeya moderna.
Estas escritoras tejen una lucha en el tapiz de la libertad. Escribiendo juntas crecen con sus lectoras, quienes encontrarán en estas páginas una razón, aunque sea sólo una, para seguir adelante, pues todas compartimos, cada quien a su manera, el mismo arduo camino.
Dirty South Haiku
Dirty South Haiku sketches a childhood and young life shaped by family legends, Southern landscapes, and the mix of sweetness and grit that sits in so many memories. The book moves through tiny scenes. Grandmas with sharp edges, gumbo secrets, cousins who grow strange, drums and guitars, pageants, honeysuckles, hot sauce, hoodoo, moonshine, and music that hums through it all. Each haiku captures one quick flash. Together, they paint a loose but vivid portrait of a Southern girl growing up around beauty, chaos, and deep roots.
While reading, I found myself smiling at the warmth tucked into these short lines. The poems feel plainspoken and familiar. I liked how the author keeps the tone light, even when hinting at hard things. Nothing gets weighed down. The rhythm stays airy. A poem might nod toward heartbreak or trouble, then slip into a memory of food or song. That contrast felt honest. Life in these pages is messy, yet the speaker holds it with affection. I felt that softness, and I enjoyed it.
Some scenes passed so fast that I wanted a fuller picture, but that is part of the charm. The book plays with nostalgia in a way that feels almost slippery. One moment, we are with a machete-wielding grandmother. Next, we are at a pageant. Then, suddenly, moonshine under a night sky. The jumpiness gave the book a dreamy, scrapbook vibe. I loved that loose flow.
I would recommend Dirty South Haiku for readers who enjoy poetry that is easy to slip into and full of mood and memory. It fits anyone who likes Southern culture, family stories, or short poems that carry a lot of heart.
Pages: 39 | ASIN : B0DXQG5C42
