Scott Cheshire of the Tottenville Review recently reviewed Joseph Salvatore’s debut collection of short stories, To Assume a Pleasing Shape. The review focuses on Salvatore’s ability to make the process of internal thought fluid, interesting, intelligent, and re-readable. “Salvatore’s writing is the kind that invites re-reading, and freely dipping in here and there. This kind of writing is rare.” The review goes on to explain that these short stories are “are lovingly drawn portraits of painful inner lives in largely threatening liminal spaces, those heartbreaking and often hilarious border moments just before our world decides to right itself, or maybe go terribly wrong.” The reviewer, Scott Cheshire, genuinely understands and enjoys the relationship Salvatore’s work has with the mind and body and the cultural perception of both. “But Salvatore’s great talent,” Cheshire explains, “is in his ability to orchestrate and represent that liminal space that is a part of ‘post-modernity’s’ problematic legacy -  we know too much, even as we know way too little.” Salvatore’s debut collection is fluid and fully realized and places the reader directly into the mind and body of each and every character. And “while most debut story collections are varied, rather hit and miss, usually because they represent a writer’s evolution through style and subject matter, Salvatore seems to have arrived fully formed.” Link to the review is right here Link to purchase the book is right here