Reviews, Interviews, Opinions

Amber Sparks, one of today's freshest literary fiction voices, is a self- proclaimed homebody with a rich fantasy life and a penchant for food she doesn’t have to cook herself.  Educated in the theatre, Sparks spent some time after college acting and directing, only to leave that world when her hero, Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, passed away.  Motivated to do something bigger, she moved to Washington, DC, where she went to graduate school for political communications.  Living with her husband and cats, she now works for a labor union, directing their online communications team—a job she says is both fun and rewarding—where she is able to fight for the workingman and against income equality.

Amber sat down with me over Google Chat (oh, thank you technology!) to talk about her debut story collection, May We Shed These Human Bodies, out now from us, Curbside Splendor Publishing. 

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Andrew Farkas was born in Akron, Ohio, and grew up there. He is the author of various pieces of fiction, some of which have appeared in Northwest Review, New Orleans Review, Whiskey Island, Emprise Review and The Brooklyn Rail. He currently lives in Chicago. He is the author of a collection of short fictions, Self-Titled Debut (winner of the 2008 Subito Press Prize for Experimental Fiction).

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Curbside Splendor: Okay, first of all, tell me really quickly why you like drinking at the Flat Iron.

Andrew Farkas: First, it was a bar that I found on my own when I first showed up to Chicago. I liked the music that was playing, and I liked that I could go in there at 7pm and get a seat with no problem.

As writers—and readers—music and rhythm is born from the beat of our hearts.  It is a necessary part of us, and I’m suspect of any writer who denies the influence music and melodies have on their own work.  Ryan Werner, music aficionado and author of Jersey Devil Press’s forthcoming collection, Shake Away These Constant Days, not only embraces the meter of song and language but uses it as direct inspiration for the thirty stories included in his collection. 

Born from a music/literature project called Our Band Could be Your Lit, and made possible in book form by Jersey Devil Press’ Kickstarter campaign, this book is testament to the accessibility offered by our ever expanding technology and the evolution of the publishing industry. 

Opening with a speculative story about John Fitzgerald Kennedy faking his death, Werner collides his own characters with historical figures in seemingly innocuous moments to terse out a deeper meaning hidden in the characters interactions.  A man plays a game of darts with Sergei Avdeyev in Moscow and discovers just “how long a second lasts.”  The last survivor of the USS Indianapolis drives the country speaking to wives of men lost at sea.  Scott Norwood misses a game winning field goal in Super Bowl XXV while a young man robs an apar

There’s something about books that push the general standards of form and function that excites me, and James Tadd Adcox’s debut, The Map of the Human System of Human Knowledge, from Tiny Hardcore Press, does just that.  It takes what we, as readers, expect a reference book to be, pairs it to what we expect from story, and the result is a novel that pushes the boundaries of story-telling in new and innovative ways. 

Sitting at a brief 140 pages, Adcox’s book is structured much like an encyclopedia.  Comprised mostly of vignettes, the book is divided into three sections, “Memory,” “Reason,” and “Imagination”—with multiple other subsections and divisions that follow.  Adcox’s narrative oscillates between memoir and fiction, the real and surreal, and the logical and the absurd.  It is a meditation on the way humans, as a race, feel the need to structure and categorize the systems of information we’ve come to accept as truths. 

As the reader delves further into this system of human knowledge, the more murky said system becomes, and it is nearly impossible to see the already thin line that separates fiction from non-fiction.  In, “Philosophy / Science of Man / Logic / Art of Communicating / Science of the Instrument of Discourse / Grammar / P

In the interest of full disclosure: Lauryn Allison Lewis is a good friend of mine.  She is also a senior managing editor of Curbside Splendor Press.  I’ve had the pleasure to see much of her writing grow and evolve through many drafts, as well as the opportunity to live vicariously through her recent successes as a young writer.  And so, it is my great pleasure to write a few words here about her latest success, solo/down, recently published from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (CCLaP). 

But make no mistake.  This is not a cheerleading session born out some misplaced desire to promote a friend’s book.  This review comes from a reader who found a deeper meaning beneath the words that make this story come alive.  You could say this is one reader imparting a book recommendation to another reader, a book whose author just happens to be a friend of mine. 

Solo/down is, as described on the CCLaP website, “a post-apocalyptic fairy tale.”  In it, Lewis creates a fantasy world that is both familiar and alien, a world where plants are devoured by carnivorous insects and can no longer grow outdoors.  The narrative follows Dr.