Tag: fiction

New Mike Thorn story, “Hell is a False Abyss”, included in charity anthology Look At Our Holes: An Anthology of Voids & Orifices (available now)

Enter into a collection rife with orifice-driven horror and transgression! From literal to metaphorical interpretations, every story in here has a hole at its core—holes that bleed, holes that ridicule, holes that perturb to no end. All sales of this book will be donated to the indigenous Cucapa community of Mexicali, B.C., Mexico.

This charity anthology features Mike Thorn’s previously unpublished story, “Hell is a False Abyss”, and stories by Alissa Nutting, Elle Nash, Charlene Elsby, Brendan Vidito, Tom Over, Josh Simmons, Max Booth III, Alexandra Challoner, and others!

ORDER HERE.

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Craftwork Episode 17: Worldbuilding, Aha Moments, & Writing for the Stage w/ S. P. Miskowski

Listen to Craftwork Episode 17: Worldbuilding, Aha Moments, & Writing for the Stage w/ S. P. Miskowski.

In this interview, we chat with S. P. Miskowski about Asian horror cinema, the power of grief, the relentless desire to shape the self, and so much more.

S. P. Miskowski is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, for literature and for drama. Her books have been recognized with four Shirley Jackson Award nominations and two Bram Stoker Award nominations. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies including Haunted Nights, Human Monsters, Looming Low I and II, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Uncertainties III, October Dreams 2, The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10, and Darker Companions: 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, and in magazines including Identity Theory, Black Static, Vastarien, Supernatural Tales, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Her grunge noir novel I Wish I Was Like You was named This Is Horror Novel of the Year 2017 and is available via Audible. An omnibus of her books set in the weird fictional town of Skillute, WA is forthcoming from Broken Eye Books in 2025.

Books and stories mentioned in this episode:

  • The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales – Alfred A. Knopf, pub.
  • The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 – S. A. Cosby, ed.
  • D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths – Ingrid & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
  • Go, Dog. Go! – P. D. Eastman
  • Rock Paper Scissors – Alice Feeney
  • The Haunting of Hill House; “Maybe it Was the Car”; “The Summer People”; We Have Always Lived in the Castle; “The Witch” – Shirley Jackson
  • None of This is True – Lisa Jewell
  • Audition – Ryū Murakami
  • “Bluebeard”; “Cinderella” – Charles Perrault
  • “The Black Cat”; “The Cask of Amontillado” – Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Last Party – A. R. Torre
  • The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023 – Lisa Unger, ed.
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Craftwork Episode 16: Dream Journals, Imaginary Conversations, & Work-Life Balance w/ Fawn Parker

Listen to Craftwork Episode 16: Dream Journals, Imaginary Conversations, & Work-Life Balance w/ Fawn Parker.

In this interview, we chat with Fawn Parker about showing the reader around the room, finding the right tense, protecting your writing time, and so much more.

Fawn Parker is the author of five books including novels What We Both Know (M&S), nominated for the Giller Prize and Hi, It’s Me (M&S), nominated for the Writer’s Trust Atwood Gibson Prize, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, which was awarded the JM Abraham Atlantic Book Award and the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Her work has been published in The Walrus, Hazlitt, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Fawn is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the Poet Laureate of Fredericton.

Books and stories mentioned in this episode:

  • The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood
  • The Mountain and the Valley – Ernest Buckler
  • Libra – Don DeLillo
  • The Guest – Emma Cline
  • Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
  • “Experience” – Tessa Hadley
  • Ulysses – James Joyce
  • Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte
  • This All Happened – Michael Winter
  • How Fiction Works – James Wood
  • Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
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Craftwork Episode 15: Character Case Files, Consecution, & the Acoustics of Language w/ Rod Moody-Corbett

Listen to Craftwork Episode 15: Character Case Files, Consecution, & the Acoustics of Language w/ Rod Moody-Corbett.

In this interview, we chat with Rod Moody-Corbett about tonal dissonance, sponging up influences, writing from memory, and so much more.

Rod Moody-Corbett is an award-winning writer from Newfoundland. His writing has appeared in Socrates on the Beach, The Drift, The Paris Review Daily, and Fiddlehead, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award for Short Fiction, the University of Calgary’s Kaleidoscope Prize, and the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Prize (People’s Choice Award). He serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.

Books mentioned in this episode:

  • Experience – Martin Amis
  • Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World; The Hundred Brothers; The Verificationist – Donald Antrim
  • Last Evenings on Earth – Roberto Bolaño
  • Save the Cat! Writes a Novel – Jessica Brody
  • My Education – Susan Choi
  • Underworld – Don DeLillo
  • Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt
  • Erasure – Percival Everett
  • Bad Behavior; Because They Wanted To; Don’t Cry – Mary Gaitskill
  • A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me; Jernigan – David Gates
  • Airships – Barry Hannah
  • The Road Through the Wall – Shirley Jackson
  • Get Shorty; Rum Punch – Elmore Leonard
  • Last Resort – Andrew Lipstein
  • The Sentence is a Lonely Place – Garielle Lutz
  • Moby Dick – Herman Melville
  • The Ice Storm – Rick Moody
  • Lectures on Literature – Vladimir Nabokov
  • A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
  • Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas; Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family – Nicholas Pileggi
  • Monkey Beach – Eden Robinson
  • The Life of the Mind – Christine Smallwood
  • The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Laurence Sterne
  • The Visiting Privilege – Joy Williams
  • To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
  • Sour Heart – Jenny Zhang
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The Catch-Up Reading Series featuring Chuck Bowie, Alison Taylor, and Mike Thorn (January 26, 3 pm, Westminster Books)

Fredericton’s monthly reading series, ‘The Catch-Up,’ curated and hosted by acclaimed writer Fawn Parker, returns with readings by local authors Alison Taylor, Chuck Bowie & Mike Thorn!

The reading will take place here at the bookshop on Sunday, January 26th, 2025, @ 3pm.

Alison Taylor (they/them) is a writer, editor, and filmmaker based in Fredericton. Taylor’s short stories have appeared in various journals, and their debut novel Aftershock, published by HarperCollins Canada, received the Atlantic Book Awards John and Margaret Savage First Book Award (Fiction), and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. They received the 2024 Douglas Adams Richards Prize for Fiction for their work-in-progress, Confessions of a Binge Drinker (working title). They have edited a hundred-plus hours of television and many award-winning short films and music videos, and their own experimental films have screened at festivals internationally. They currently work in the editorial department at Goose Lane Editions and as a freelance editor of both books and film and video, and are working to complete a draft while two cats yell at them and a 70-pound boxer whines in their face.

Mike Thorn is a SSHRC-funded doctoral candidate in the Department of English (Creative Writing) at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His writing has appeared in anthologies, magazines, and podcasts, including NoSleep, Vastarien, In Review Online, and American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper. He co-hosts Craftwork, a writing-themed podcast, with Miriam Richer. Website: mikethornwrites.com.

Chuck Bowie is both a writer and an author, with thirteen books/novels published and one just underway. While he enjoys writing mysteries: Suspense-Thrillers and Cozy Mysteries, he also writes short stories. All of his books are well-reviewed, and he has sat on the boards of the Writers’ Federation of NB, The Writers’ Union of Canada, is a Fellow of the Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts, as well as being acknowledged as a member of the Miramichi Literary Trail. His thriller series chronicles the adventures of Donovan, an international thief for hire, while his cozy series (written as Alexa Bowie) follows the adventures of the owner of an arts centre as Emma solves the crimes that swirl around her centre: The Old Manse. http://www.chuckbowie.ca

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Best first reads, 2024

Pre-2024 releases only.

TOP 10 (one per author)

Daisy Miller, by Henry James (1879)
A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908)
Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1912)
The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton (1913)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
Cassandra at the Wedding, by Dorothy Baker (1962)
Another World, by Pat Barker (1998)
Heartbreaker, by Maryse Meijer (2016)
Babysitter, by Joyce Carol Oates (2022)
The Guest, by Emma Cline (2023)

ADDITIONAL STANDOUT READS

We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, by Paula D. Ashe (2022)
This Mortal Coil, by Cynthia Asquith (1947)
The Space of Literature, by Maurice Blanchot (1955)
The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot (1980)
Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury (1957)
Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, by Charles Brockden Brown (1798)
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, by Charles Brockden Brown (1799)
The Sublime and the Beautiful, by Edmund Burke (1757)
The Daughters of Block Island, by Christa Carmen (2023)
Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, by Jodey Castricano (2021)
The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers (1895)
Don’t Look Now, by Daphne du Maurier (1971)
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin (2016)
Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories, by Craig Laurance Gidney (2008)
Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837)
The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1860)
The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith (1955)
The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill (1983)
The Witchcraft of Salem Village, by Shirley Jackson (1956)
Let Me Tell You, by Shirley Jackson [edited by Laurence Hyman & Sarah Hyman DeWitt] (2015)
Burn Man: Selected Stories, by Mark Anthony Jarman (2023)
Man and His Symbols, edited by C. G. Jung & M.-L von Franz (1964)
Uzumaki, by Junji Ito (2013)
The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009)
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, by Thomas King (2003)
Something Like an Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa (1981)
What Are You, by Lindsay Lerman (2022)
Existence and Existents, by Emmanuel Levinas (1947)
Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious (1956)
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, by Lorrie Moore (1994)
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison (1992)
Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley (1990)
Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
New England’s Gothic Literature, by Faye Ringel (1995)
The Gothic Literature and History of New England, by Faye Ringel (2022)
The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, by Julie Salamon (1991)
The Last Man, by Mary Shelley (1826)
The Craft of Writing, by William Sloane (1979)
Lost Boy Lost Girl, by Peter Straub (2003)
The Door, by Magda Szabó (1987)
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, by Tzvetan Todorov (1970)
A Fatal Inversion, by Barbara Vine (1987)
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (1982)
Star-Begotten, by H. G. Wells (1937)
Ghosts, by Edith Wharton (1937)
The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (1987)
Strange Seed, by T. M. Wright (1978)

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