The Central Park Pact Series is a romance series comprising three books: Passion on Park Avenue, Love on Lexington Avenue, and Marriage on Madison Avenue. They center on three women—Naomi, Claire, and Audrey—who were all duped by the same man, Brayden Hayes. Claire is the wife, who believed her husband was faithful, if absent. Audrey was the girlfriend, who believed he was going through a divorce and would marry her someday. Naomi was the mistress, who thought Brayden was single, and having a fling. All three find out the truth when Brayden dies in a freak accident. The wife, girlfriend, and mistress connect and become unlikely friends, striving to protect each other in their future romantic endeavors.…
Drawing inspiration from her dreamscapes, Southern roots, and the innovative rhythms and structures of Americana music, Lauren Moseley has crafted a sensual and provocative collection of poems that invites us to reevaluate the connection between our inner and outer worlds. Her debut, Big Windows, which Carnegie Mellon University Press released in February of 2018, has surfaced at a time when humanity is confronting an onslaught of social unrest, political upheaval, and aesthetic bankruptcy that often distracts us from the ecstasy we might otherwise find by tuning into our immediate environment. Each poem in this collection is a progression through the stages of disillusionment, humility, wonder, and ultimately, enlightenment.
Moseley’s writing challenges readers to reinstate the practice of observing what the French writer, George Perec, refers to as, the infraordinary—the seemingly trivial and yet intrinsically beautiful objects and events of the everyday.…
Darrin Doyle is quite an accomplished writer, having published two novels (Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story and The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo), a sequence of fiction (The Dark Will End the Dark), and many individual pieces in various journals over the last decade. Couple that with his diverse history of jobs (including paperboy, pizza delivery job, janitor, door-to-door salesman, telemarketer, and janitor)—as well as his experiences living around the country and teaching English in Japan—and it’s no surprise that his latest short story collection, Scoundrels Among Us, radiates a mixture of [mostly] down-to-earth situations and eloquently refined yet quite accessible language. While not every piece in it is as conclusive, eventful, and/or impactful as it could be, they’re all at least enjoyably inventive, with a few downright enthralling entries that’ll stick with you long after you’ve read them.…
We’re born with a finite number of opportunities. Attrition, bad choices, misspent goodwill, and fucked-up luck. The opportunities dwindle through a process called living. Our portfolio of prospects turns into a tattered novel of outcomes. I am twenty-two.
Thus opens Where Night Stops, the latest book from American writer Douglas Light, whose story collection, Girls of Trouble, won the 2010 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. (Also, his debut, East Fifth Bliss, was turned into the film Trouble with Bliss, which starred Michael C. Hall, Brie Larson, and Peter Fonda.) Filled with tense and intriguing situations, plenty of poignant and philosophical sentiments, and an assortment of colorful—if also slightly underdeveloped—characters, the novel is a captivating psychological drama whose relentless vibrancy and pace mostly makes up for its marginally opaque and repetitious core.…
I have to admit: I wasn’t planning on writing about Living the Dream when I was originally scheduling my review coverage. The book I had initially chosen to talk about this month was a darker, more “literary” pick, but with the news covering natural disasters and violent protests, I needed to immerse myself in something lighter. Instead, I chose Lauren Berry’s debut novel, and I’m so glad I did. It was such a pleasure to get lost in the lives of twenty-something Londoners as they made messes out of their careers, romantic relationships, and friendships (and tried their damnedest to clean them up.…
Anyone who saw me reading Things We Lost in the Fire in public must have thought I was suffering and in deep pain. Every story in Mariana Enriquez’s debut collection had me grimacing and squirming, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. But her stories are so thoroughly transporting that I lacked the self-awareness to care. I was far away in Argentina, worried about the news of the decapitated child flashing across the television screen, and the one-armed girl who went missing in a haunted house, and on a murder tour of Buenos Aires. Enriquez’s stories all center around life in Argentina, often detailing the lives of disadvantaged youth. These stories are dark and unsettling, written so beautifully that the whole experience of reading them leaves you in a macabre trance.…
