“A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that’s about all.”

Bessie Smith
It’s been years since I read the story below in its vintage format, a nicotine-yellowed Cosmopolitan magazine from 1948, from the Special Collections Department in the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina, which I frequently visited as an ILL tech. One of its greatest patrons and denizens, my favorite [...]

An Arsonist’s Guide to Contemporary Literature

I’d read and thoroughly enjoyed Brock Clarke’s story collection Carrying the Torch. And so it was with some interest this fall that I purchased for the library An Arsonist’s Guide to New England Writers’ Homes. Talk about a book that needed to be written. It’s all there: the spiritual, existentially depressed vacuum that is the [...]