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Memorable Moments
Paperbacks & Baguettes is a novella-in-flash set in a bookstore and café where baristas, booksellers, and customers create a community through small, repeated encounters. What was the inspiration behind this collection of stories?
For years, I managed a bookstore café, and if you had asked me then whether I was collecting stories, I would have said no. I was making coffee, shelving books, helping customers, and trying to keep the day moving.
Looking back, I realize I wasn’t remembering the busiest days. I was remembering the people who kept coming back.
There was the customer who always wandered the shelves before ordering. The bookseller who remembered what someone had enjoyed months earlier. The regular who glanced around the room before sitting down, hoping a familiar face was already there.
Over time, people who had arrived as strangers began expecting to see one another. If someone hadn’t been in for a week or two, someone else would ask about them.
It wasn’t a dramatic story. It was an ordinary one. But I came to realize that familiar places can change us simply by becoming part of our lives. That’s where Paperbacks & Baguettes began.
Many of the book’s most memorable moments come from small gestures rather than dramatic events. What attracts you to writing about those quiet, easily overlooked moments of everyday life?
I’m interested in the moment someone realizes they’ve been remembered.
A barista starts making a drink before the order is placed. A bookseller sets aside a novel because they think a frequent customer will enjoy it. Someone clears a chair because they know another regular usually sits there.
From the outside, those gestures don’t seem like much. But they say something we all hope to hear: I’m glad you’re here. I noticed you.
Those moments stay with me because they’re easy to overlook while they’re happening. Looking back, they’re often what we remember most clearly.
Recurring objects—books, coffee cups, umbrellas, playlists, and scarves—create a sense of continuity throughout the collection. How did you decide which details would reappear to tie the stories together?
I never made a list of things that should come back. They returned for the same reason they do in real life.
Spend enough time in a place and certain things become part of its rhythm. The mug someone always reaches for. Umbrellas gathering by the door when it rains. A scarf left over the back of a chair while someone wanders the shelves. The same song that somehow seems to find its way back every few weeks.
Those details reminded me that the café wasn’t starting over with each story. Life had been going on before the reader arrived, and it would keep going after the story ended.
I wanted the café to feel lived in, not simply described.
What do you hope readers carry with them after spending time in the world of Paperbacks & Baguettes?
I hope they think about the familiar places that have become part of their lives.
Maybe it’s a bookstore, a coffee shop, a library, or a neighborhood restaurant. Places where people begin to recognize one another, not because they’ve shared their life stories, but because they’ve shared enough ordinary days.
We’re often part of each other’s lives long before we have words for the relationship. We know someone’s usual table. We notice when they haven’t been around. We hope they’re doing well.
If the book does anything, I hope it’s simply this: that the next time readers walk into one of those familiar places, they notice the people who have quietly become part of their own story.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Some places hold you longer than you expect.
Paperbacks & Baguettes unfolds in a bookstore café – paperbacks, coffee, food; early mornings and late closings; regulars who linger and staff who notice what others miss. Exchanges begin to matter: a scarf left loose, a mug still warm, a playlist quietly shared. Closeness forms – not through grand gestures, but through attention. A love story told sideways, shaped by presence rather than plot, and by care rather than drama. It belongs as much to the room and its people as to any single pair.
Paperbacks & Baguettes: Stories Between Us
Michael M. Brownstein’s Paperbacks & Baguettes is a novella-in-flash set inside a combined bookstore and café, where baristas, booksellers, managers, regulars, and passing customers create a community through small, repeated encounters. The book builds its story through brief scenes: an umbrella left by a shelf, a playlist shared across the counter, a scarf catching on a book, a warm cup waiting for someone who may return. Familiar people and objects reappear, so each vignette adds another layer to the ones before it. By the end, the bookstore café feels less like a backdrop and more like a living presence that notices, remembers, and quietly connects everyone who enters.
Brownstein’s writing is at its best when it pays attention to gestures that usually disappear before anyone thinks to name them. A hand pauses above a mug. Two people adjust their grip on the same box. Someone straightens a book on a shelf that doesn’t belong to them. These details carry much of the book’s emotional weight, especially in the gradual relationship between the woman with the scarf and the man behind the counter. Their connection develops through music, books, glances, and unfinished sentences, which makes the final scenes feel earned without turning the romance into the only reason to keep reading. The larger story is also about work, belonging, and the ways shared spaces become meaningful through ordinary care.
The book reminded me of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, though Brownstein works on a smaller and gentler scale. Both books use linked stories to show how individual lives overlap within a community, and both trust accumulation more than dramatic revelation. Strout often moves between sharply defined characters and exposes the private tensions beneath public behavior. Brownstein stays closer to atmosphere, letting recurring sounds, smells, objects, and routines provide continuity. His characters aren’t always named, but they become recognizable through their habits. That approach gives the book an intimate, almost musical structure, with images and phrases returning like variations on a melody.
The repeated descriptions of light, warmth, steam, shelves, and things left unsaid can feel carefully patterned, but that pattern is also central to the book’s appeal. Paperbacks & Baguettes asks the reader to slow down and notice how affection often appears before anyone calls it affection, and how a room becomes a home through repetition. It’s a warm, observant book with a strong sense of place and an unusual confidence in quiet moments. Readers who enjoy linked fiction, understated romance, and stories about the hidden emotional life of everyday spaces will find plenty to linger over here.
Pages: 172 | ASIN : B0H4BFVS7H
Viscera Varnish: A Novella
Viscera Varnish, by Jason Garman, is a horror novella about Daniel Virek, a celebrated Chicago artist whose talent has begun to curdle into repetition, panic, and desperation. After a humiliating gallery opening confirms that the art world is losing faith in him, Daniel returns to the grisly private ritual that once made his work feel alive: murder as medium, the body as pigment, suffering as process. What begins as a portrait of artistic decay soon slips into stranger territory, where guilt, ambition, and something occultly bureaucratic gather around him like wet paint refusing to dry.
I liked how confidently the novella marries the grotesque with the mundane. Garman does not treat Daniel like a mythic monster at first; he lets him move through apartments, galleries, fast food bags, traffic, bad parking, and petty professional humiliations. That ordinariness makes the horror feel less theatrical and more contaminating. The violence is extreme, but the more unsettling element is Daniel’s almost clerical calm. He has turned atrocity into workflow, and the book keeps asking whether the world around him is horrified by that or merely waiting to see if the result sells.
What I appreciated most was the way the book skewers the appetite of the art scene without flattening it into parody. The gallery patrons, managers, and critics are ridiculous, but they are not harmless; their hunger for genius gives Daniel’s monstrosity a market. The prose has a slick, nasty elegance when it wants to, especially in the descriptions of canvases that seem less painted than coagulated. I also liked the late turn toward the uncanny, where the story stops being only about a killer artist and becomes something more metaphysical: a grim little fable about inspiration, extraction, and the cost of being “special.”
Readers drawn to horror novellas, psychological horror, body horror, supernatural horror, occult and dark art thrillers will find plenty to admire here, especially if they like their nightmares intimate, bloody, and morally rancid. Fans of Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart may recognize a similar fascination with the border between ecstasy, creation, and mutilation, though Garman’s voice is grimier, more contemporary, and sharpened by satire of artistic prestige. Viscera Varnish is a savage little gallery of ambition and appetite, where the masterpiece is never as frightening as the price paid to make it.
Pages: 131 | ASIN : B0H1DSB67X
Lies, Lust, and Larceny
Lies, Lust, and Larceny, by Lisa Marie Shankles, is a satirical novella about twin sisters, Lilah and Laylah Larceny, whose retirement plans spiral into jealousy, identity theft, petty crime, Norwegian prison fantasies, and an unexpectedly strange adventure involving aliens, a mysterious cat named Dyngus, and a trip to Scandinavia. At its heart, this is a comic crime adventure with satirical and light sci-fi elements, built around sibling rivalry and the wild places envy can take a person.
What stood out to me first was the book’s sheer willingness to be odd. It doesn’t ease into its weirdness. It jumps. One moment I was reading about Dyngus Day in Buffalo, family tension, retirement, and salon life, and the next I was following a plan to use Norway’s humane prison system as a retirement strategy. That’s a bold premise, and I appreciated how fully Shankles commits to it. The humor is broad and often deliberately ridiculous, but there is an energy to it that keeps the story moving. It feels like the kind of tale someone might tell over coffee after saying, “You will not believe where this goes.”
I also found the contrast between Lilah and Laylah to be the book’s strongest engine. Lilah is more open, curious, and impulsive, while Laylah is driven by resentment and the ache of always feeling second-best. That emotional thread gives the absurd plot something real to stand on. The writing can be uneven at times, with long explanations and some jokes that land harder than others. It’s going for chaos, color, and momentum. The author’s choices are playful and unafraid, especially in the way she blends crime comedy, travel fantasy, paranormal touches, and alien strangeness into one offbeat package.
Lies, Lust, and Larceny is a light, eccentric satire for readers who enjoy strange premises, flawed characters, and humor that leans into the outrageous. I would recommend it most to fans of quirky novellas, comic crime stories, and anyone who likes their fiction a little unhinged, a little mischievous, and not too concerned with staying inside the lines.
Pages: 182 | ASIN : B0C9S88LGB
Journey Into Romance
A Is for Amy follows a widowed mother of three who stumbles back into romance, desire, and selfhood through a chaotic alphabet of flirtation, exhaustion, and second chances, discovering that opening your heart again is both ridiculous and necessary. What was the inspiration for your story?
I wrote this novella when my two youngest children were under 3. Though I loved being a parent, I felt my prior self was completely submerged in the care of my kids. So, I decided to write something quick with a big heart, something for grown-ups to explore. A journey into romance grounded in the real-world of parenting young kids. I wanted to capture the economy and directness of short fiction with the ability to follow the significant development of a main character that comes with the novel.
The novella never treats motherhood as separate from desire. Why was it important to keep those parts of Amy’s identity intertwined?
She is a whole person. Her sexuality is a part of this wholeness. Her loss and suffering have affected how she perceives herself and her life. Her negativity at the beginning can be reductive and limiting. Sexuality is one way we can awaken to our true spirit. Amy is awakening in this novella.
The idea of Amy naming her life one piece at a time: Attraction, Baby Bartlette, Freedom, and Nutella, gives the structure emotional meaning. Did those specific entries arrive early, or did they accumulate through drafting?
Those are names that I choose, not Amy. Amy would see them as part of the ebb and flow of her life. They are details, not necessarily stages. They are on the cover to engage the reader. I see the cover as the beginning of the book, the beginning of the adventure for the reader. These words are welcome, mystery, and invitation. A tease if you like.
The alphabet format also makes the book look like a children’s picture book from the outside. Was that visual misdirection intentional — and what do you want a reader to feel when they open it and discover what’s actually inside?
Yes, the cover is deliberately deceptive. So parents, grandparents, and any caregivers can read the book incognito as they care for the children. The deception is clearly stated on the back cover. The inside design is quite different, too. It is for grownups. Like the story. I wanted the reading experience to be a refuge for the reader. A world grounded in the reality of parenting, but free from it at the same time. This is a book for the person every parent was before they were a parent. A place to laugh and cry and engage with a compelling character – to celebrate and suffer with her. To read not for a child, but for themselves. I hope the readers feel at their ease as they journey. My goal is to delight them.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Website | Amazon
Amy Dellaconta Franklin is an independent mother of 3 kids under 5. Her life is often exhausting and isolating. Then, one day, love comes knocking at her front door.
Amy is a sassy, charming, yet lonely young widow who unexpectedly finds herself on the path of finding love again. Surprises overturn expectations at nearly every turn in this novella, which tells the story of how a life that seemed trapped in the too-hard basket became a voyage of romantic discovery.
A is for Amy tells it fast, straight and funny. From negativity to bliss. With no fluff and no wasted words.
Do you like reading but never seem to have enough space to start (or finish) a book? Each chapter in this romancecan be enjoyed in the time it takes to drink a good cup of coffee.
This is a great gift for parents or parents-to-be. It looks like an alphabet book for children. But inside, it’s a romantic adventure for grown-ups with a surprise ending that will touch your heart.
A is for Amy
A Is for Amy by Steven Crandell is a romantic comedy novella about Amy, a young widowed mother of three trying to find her way back into desire, confidence, and choice after grief, betrayal, and exhaustion have narrowed her life. The story follows her alphabetically through encounters with Charlie, an alluring ex-milkman with his own wounds, and Quentin, a gentler surprise who eventually becomes the more grounded romantic possibility. It’s funny, messy, and deliberately intimate, a romance that is less about being rescued than about remembering that wanting something is allowed.
I really liked the voice. It’s sharp, playful, and sometimes outrageous, but underneath the jokes there is real loneliness. Amy’s thoughts move the way a tired parent’s mind moves, bouncing from breast-feeding to unpaid bills to sex to self-help books to the weird emotional weather of being seen again. I liked that the humor doesn’t polish her life into something cute. It lets the house be chaotic. It lets grief be ugly. It lets motherhood be loving and boring and gross and sacred, sometimes all on the same page.
Crandell makes a bold choice with the alphabet structure, and I think it works because the book itself feels like Amy trying to name her life one piece at a time. Attraction. Baby Bartlette. Freedom. Nutella. Yes. The structure gives the novella a quick, bright rhythm, almost like flipping through snapshots. I did sometimes feel the comedy pushed hard, especially with Bart and some of the broader side characters, but even then, the excess seems tied to Amy’s way of surviving. She turns pain into punchlines because otherwise the pain would just sit there, heavy and unmoving.
As a romantic comedy novella, A Is for Amy will probably appeal most to readers who like love stories with bite, warmth, and a little domestic chaos. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys character-driven romance, especially stories about second chances after loss. This book has sass, it has crumbs on the floor, kids at the door, and a heart that keeps choosing to open.
Pages: 95 | ASIN : B0GL9VKNXS
Be Wary of Wishes Gone Awry : Tales of Horror and Dark Fantasy
Be Wary of Wishes Gone Awry is a horror and dark fantasy collection that gathers six shorter pieces and a longer three-part novella, moving from sea-haunted myth and biotech dread to grief-soaked domestic horror. Across stories like “Sailor’s Warning,” “The Aberration,” “Dearest Diary,” and “The Enhancement,” author M. Ainihi keeps circling the same uneasy question: what happens when people reach for relief, certainty, progress, or love and get something warped in return. The book’s structure, split into “One-Shot Shorts,” “Slightly Bigger Bites,” and the closing “Miracle Baby,” gives it a steady build, with the final section carrying the heaviest emotional weight.
The book understands one of horror’s oldest pleasures: dread lands harder when it grows out of something ordinary. A sailor wants to finish a voyage and go home. A woman makes a greedy decision she cannot morally outrun. Someone wants the pain to stop. Someone wants to be more productive. Those setups are simple on purpose, and that works. The writing is often most effective when it stays close to a character’s physical unease, the heat of a fever, the sting of a wound, the metallic shock of blood, the hush before something awful fully shows itself. “Sailor’s Warning” especially caught me with its mix of folklore and fatalism, while “The Aberration” and “The Enhancement” feel like sharp modern horror, interested in guilt, ambition, and the cost of trying to correct what should maybe be left alone.
I also found myself noticing the author’s choices around control. That feels like the live wire running through the whole collection. These stories keep putting people in situations where they think they are making a practical choice, a smart choice, maybe even a loving one, and then the ground shifts under them. Sometimes that works brilliantly. It gives the book a clear identity and makes the horror feel grounded rather than random. I stayed interested because Ainihi is good at building atmosphere and at letting shame, grief, superstition, and obsession do part of the frightening work. The collection isn’t just creepy for the sake of being creepy. It wants to poke at human weakness.
I’d recommend Wishes Gone Awry most to readers who enjoy horror and dark fantasy that lean more toward mood, moral consequence, and unsettling imagery than nonstop shock. It should work well for people who like short fiction with a gothic pulse, creature horror with a human center, and novellas that sit in the uncomfortable space between sorrow and nightmare. I would especially recommend it to someone who enjoys horror that feels reflective after the scare.
Pages: 173 | ASIN : B0GN3KCB59
Find The Part That Wants To Live
Teach Me How to Die follows a small group of strangers who gather in a New York rehearsal studio to attend a class on writing suicide notes and explore the situations that lead them to this point. What sparked the idea of a master class devoted to writing suicide notes?
The idea of placing everyone in obviously impossible circumstances is the basis of the novella. This artistic method is known as mystical realism, in which mystical elements are incorporated into a realistic picture of the world. A master class on writing suicide notes is impossible by definition. But everything that happens during it is incredibly realistic. The characters in the story don’t question how this is possible. At first, the reader might briefly think it’s a joke. But the characters’ behavior convinces the reader of the authenticity of what’s happening. We conducted a survey of audience members who had seen a production of the play of the same name Off-Broadway, asking whether such a master class was possible. The overwhelming majority answered affirmatively! For me, this meant the approach had worked. In many ways, this determined the desire to publish a novella “Teach Me How to Die” based on the play of the same name.
Each character is identified by an archetype rather than a name. What did that choice allow you to explore?
Not so much an archetype, which, as we know, provides a collective image. Rather, we analyze temperament types and personality traits characteristic of a particular profession or occupation. All people are different, but certain types have their own behavioral, responsive, and thought patterns. By replacing their first name with a nickname, the members of this temporary group presented themselves as they saw fit. Thus, some identified with their occupation—Violinist, Accountant, Poet. Others identified through self-esteem, for example, Loser. A participant whose purpose in life was to get even with those who had offended him called himself a Hunter. And someone prone to “philosophizing”—a Philosopher. In him, both his profession and a unique way of perceiving the world merged.
The idea of suicide can occur to almost anyone at some difficult moment in their life. We exclude individuals with mental illness or those under the influence of acute traumatic circumstances or psychoactive substances. Suicide is essentially a destructive way to resolve an intrapersonal conflict. Throughout the narrative, we see how individual personality traits shape reactions to external factors, leading to hopelessness, disillusionment with life, and, consequently, a desire to leave it all behind… The encounter of a certain personality type with an obstacle to satisfying their most important needs leads to a suicidal decision. To help others, firstly, suspect the presence of such thoughts in their loved ones, and secondly, provide all possible assistance in understanding the situation, thereby offering a chance to prevent a tragic outcome. The novella presents various personality types in crisis. Suicidal tendencies are transient and ambivalent, a fact well known to psychologists.
This means that the decision can be influenced. You just need to find the key to that part of the personality “that wants to live,” while blocking the one “that wants to die.” It’s difficult, but possible. And it’s always worth trying, because the stakes are too high – a human life.
Suicide is handled with seriousness but without sensationalism. What boundaries did you set for yourself while writing?
In the foreword, I explain that the novella “Teach Me How to Die” is based on real events from my life. It so happened that one of my classmates was going through a difficult period of finding and accepting his gender identity, facing rejection from his family. He regularly called me late at night and shared his plans – his desire to end his life. At first, this frightened me very much, but then I realized that these were just “lingering” thoughts spoken aloud, and I started distracting him with stories about methods of suicide and the content of suicide notes. I gleaned this information from a book I accidentally bought at a street market, written by a pathologist; I think it was called “101 Ways to Take Your Own Life.” It also included examples of suicide notes with thier analysis. Quite soon, I realized that this spontaneously developed form of communication was exactly what he was ready to accept at that moment. Fortunately, the part of his personality “that wanted to live” prevailed: he is alive, healthy, successful, and quite happy with his life.
At the very beginning of that story, I considered the conversation on such a sensitive topic to be a boundary I shouldn’t cross. Then my boundaries of what was permissible expanded, convincing me that any red line can be crossed if it helps save someone’s life. When writing the novella, I took into account the opinions of people who had such negative experiences in their families. Both for the would-be suicides themselves and their family members, despite the “sensitivity” of the topic, there is a clear understanding of the need to talk about suicide as a preventive measure.
If a reader struggling with dark thoughts picks up this book, what do you hope it offers them in that moment?
The main message of the novella is: “Share your dark thoughts, don’t keep them to yourself! You will be heard!” And a call to those around people whose world has narrowed today to the obsessive thought of ending their lives: “Don’t pass by, find the ‘right’ words, work together to find any way out of the impasse, even the most unusual and phantasmagorical ones will do!”
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Instagram | Website
The collection of nine short stories addresses the issues of gender identity, finding one’s place within society, problems of empathy for loved ones, and overall, how to stay on the side of Good in the age of “inverted” values. A look into the future allows us to believe in the possibility of preserving such human values as love, mercy, kindness, mutual assistance, self-realization, and personal and professional development from a historical perspective.
