Favorite New Fiction
from Small and Micro Publishers

When I finished Nick Kolakowski’s riveting thriller Boise Longpig Hunting Club, I was eager for a sequel. Over the course of that novel, the central characters–bounty hunter Jake Halligan, his gun-running sister, Frankie, and Jake’s fiancée, Janine–became prey in a “Most Dangerous Game”-style hunt orchestrated by a corrupt and powerful billionaire, Ted Baker, who’d blamed the death of his coke-dealing brother on Jake and Frankie’s late father, a former deputy. Though the trio ended up slaughtering their way to freedom, one thing seemed clear by the novel’s conclusion: When you kill a man like Baker, along with his rich and influential fellow hunters, there are bound to be consequences.

Fortunately for readers like me, Kolakowski just released Rattlesnake Rodeo, a gripping sequel that unleashes these consequences with force, pushing Jake and Frankie into uncomfortable new territory, physically and morally.

In the simplest sense, Rage is a Wolf portrays one young woman’s quest to make a difference in the world and to find meaning in her life, outside of the boundaries of high school. But much to this credit of this imaginative and inspiring novel, her quest is nothing but simple, and it leads to transformative discoveries about herself and the world.

This insightful and inspiring short-story collection takes us through pivotal events and experiences in the life of the protagonist, Angie Rubio, as she advances from kindergarten to her senior year of high school during the turbulent sixties and early seventies. Throughout, Angie is often treated as an outsider–in many cases, because of the color of her skin (“toast, well done”). Yet over the years–and echoing the protest movements of the time–she finds ways to take power from her outsiderdom, discovering her voice as a young woman and as a writer.

This wonderfully strange, thought-provoking, and hilarious novel defies simple categorization. Is it a study of the soulless mining of personal data for the greediest of ends? Is it a suspenseful tale of a battle of the wills–one Apollonian, the other Dionysian? Is it an artful melding of poetry and prose? Yes and yes and yes. As disparate as these elements may seem, in the end they add up to an entertaining, enlightening whole.

In this inventive and affecting novel, the barriers between the real world and the worlds of the imagination, magic, and folklore become porous at best and sometimes dissolve altogether. As disorienting as these breaks with reality are for the couple at the center of the story, Adrian Dussett and Ben Hughes, they ultimately prove revelatory, pushing Adrian and Ben to confront personal difficulties that have troubled them for years and created a divide in their relationship.

The “little feasts” in this darkly intriguing story collection are works of flash fiction that explore a variety of appetites: the kinds that few people would discuss over dinner, but that say much about the scope and strangeness of desire, and about its potential to endanger or save us.

K: A Novel offers a gripping, nuanced exploration of how imprisonment tests a writer–mentally, physically, and morally. Just as compelling is how the novel conveys the writer’s need for self-expression, which never diminishes, even under the most trying circumstances.