BOA Blog

Booklist (online) is calling The Era of Not Quite a "promising first book," which "jettisons as many fictional conventions" as possible. "Written in a plain style and using the flexible logic and tropes of fables, these tales wink at the reader in a sly, postmodern way, saying, in effect, 'This is the not the world, it is fiction, but how worldlike fiction is, and how worldly readers feel feeling real feelings about fictional worlds.' And Watson’s world is like a Möbius strip made of flypaper." The Era of Not Quite, just released by BOA in May, is chock-a-block with deaths,...

The Review of Contemporary Fiction is calling Aimee Parkison's The Innocent Party (BOA, 2012) an "accomplished prose," with "startling cinematic imagery." "In these newest stories, it is easy to get seduced as much by the sonic texture," says reviewer Joseph Dewey. "But make no mistake—Parkison is a storyteller, conjuring characters who harbor festering secrets, lurid urgencies, and violent compulsions. Like Joyce Carol Oates, Parkison deftly works the caricatures of Southern Gothicism into terrifying clarity." "Like so many of her generation, raised entirely within the reach of visual technology, Aimee Parkison, whose stories have garnered both critical praise and prestigious awards,...

During his Brooklyn book launch for The Era of Not Quite, hosted by Freebird Books, Douglas Watson performed his own musical original as a finale to accompany the new book. Joining him on ukulele is Hannah Tinti, co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine, and on percussion, BOA's own Anthony Tognazzini (even though there weren't any drums). Check it out! You'll be singing it for days. In preparation for Douglas Watson's honored appearance as one of seven One Story literary debutantes at the One Story Literary Debutante Ball tomorrow night (June 6), Watson is introduced with a new One Story...

According to Publishers Weekly, poet Hugh Martin's The Stick Soldiers is a "solid, sad verse debut," as it recounts his years preparing for, journeying to, and returning from the Iraq war. "Stateside training generates some of his strangest, harshest poems, including a prose anecdote that might describe a murder. Time back at home, in snowy Ohio, prompts alienated, ambivalent regret, comparable at best to Randall Jarrell’s poems on World War II airmen and veterans. Yet the bulk of the book, and its reason for being, involve Martin’s time in Iraq. Sand gets everywhere, IEDs could be anywhere, children are sources...

The Missouri Review (online) has featured Douglas Watson's "Against Specificity," the first story in his new collection The Era of Not Quite, for National Short Story Month. Reviewer Kyle Minor says the story is "among the most extraordinary stories [he's] ever read." Watson is the winner of the inaugural BOA Short Fiction Prize and works for Time magazine. The story's opening line is remarkable, "a distillation of general Americanness... the bare bones set-up that fuels 90% of all American fiction." The trouble: You want Thing A but are stuck with Thing B. According to Minor, Watson flouts fiction-writing standards in...