"Ripening: NFFD 2018 anthology" by Santino Prinzi and Alison Powell (eds) (Gumbo Press, 2018)

The National Flash Fiction Day anthology with the theme "Food". Flash and a few micros.

Favourites were "Famous last meals" (Nan Wigington), "Milk and Eggs" (Megan Giddings) and "Attack of the Robot Grannies" (Angela Readman)

"Mouth to mouth" by Antoine Wilson

An audio book.

The narrator is a married American father. He's on his way to Berlin where his publisher is trying to make him into a cult author. Waiting for a delayed plane he bumps into Jeff who he knew at college. Jeff's monologue takes over. 20 years before he saved a man from drowning. After, he tracked the man, Francis, down and found that he was a rich art-dealer who'd married an artist, Alison. Francis wasn't a nice person - he exploited customers and staff. Jeff got a job at Francis's gallery. He dated Chloe before finding out that she was Francis's daughter.

Jeff says he has 3 galleries, including one in Berlin.

When it was revealed that Francis was having an affair with an art student, Francis organised a European skiing holiday - he and Alison, Jeff and Chloe. He got Jeff to help him win Chloe over. Chloe resented this. Francis (a good skier) took Jeff (who struggled) to a very steep descent. Francis collapsed, and Jeff continued down to get help. Francis was dead when the rescue team arrived. Jeff married Chloe and took over the business.

When the narrator reaches Berlin, he finds that he doesn't have much of a chance as an author. He checks on Jeff's story, which seems true except that reports say that Francis died because he was hit by a skier.

It's a short novel. I like the phrase (not original) "Like God in plain clothes". The narrator barely features - I'm unsure why it needs to be a framed stor. The given reasons for Jeff telling his story are unconvincing. When Jeff was questioned after the skiing incident what did he say? Seems like I like the book a lot less than others do.

Other reviews

y

• Anne Logan (I became frustrated by Jeff’s ramblings, and I wanted to know more about our narrator. But once I realized the narrator is irrelevant and the whole point of the story is Jeff’s weird experience, I settled into the story. ... These subtle observations about each character (everyone but the narrator) brilliantly uncovers the life of the internal; all the critical elements of this story happen beneath the surface.)
• John Gu (At every moment, in Wilson’s story, the reader is ready to rush onward to find what will happen next. This makes for great readability, but what is gained in speed is sometimes lost in depth. The novel suggests more than it can flesh out in its 200 pages, and though Wilson spares us red herrings, false starts, and dead ends for the most part, you can see that there are some diversions he could have taken to give us a more complete picture of the world he has constructed.)
• Carr Harkrader

"Granta 148: Summer fiction" (Granta, 2019)

• The spread (Ben Lerner) - At an interscholastic debating competition, teams use a tactic to "spread" opponents, introducing many issues as fast as they can. It's taken over from standard debating, as it has in the real world. Senator Bob Dole hands out the prizes. The final paragraph begins with "Now I am going to show you a picture and I'd like you to make up a story about it. We call this the Thematic Apperception Test or TAT. A story with a beginning, a middle and an end."
• Innards (Magogodi oaMphela Makhene) - A black South African dies. We get the tribal history - choosing abattoir hearts; rusty bicycles, etc.
• The Line (Amor Towles) - In the last days of the final Tzar, peasant Pushkin and his wife, childless, move to Moscow to join the revolution. She progresses in a factory. He gets sacked and spends hours queuing for food. He's good at it, enlisting help from about a dozen boys. He queues from someone wanting an exit visa and ended up, after 18 days with a pass for him and his wife to New York. His wife looks upon it as a way to spread Communism. When they get there she goes to a factory, leaving him. He queues at a soap kitchen.
• Quantum Displacement (Nuar Alsadir) - 3 pages of left-aligned prose that uses "^" and " " instead of punctuation. There's a margin note too. [No]
• Longshore drift (Julia Armfield) - Alice and Min, both 17, sell ice-creams from a van. Neither have had friendships with boys though they're probably straight. A group of boys flirt with them as they get ice-creams, not paying. They swim together among basking sharks - scary but not dangerous.
• Charles Parker plays Bossa Nova (Haruki Murakami) - The narrator wrote a spoof music review for a student magazine. 15 years later in New York he sees the record. He doesn't buy it because at $35 dollars it's too much. Next day he goes back. The shop assistant says the record was never there. Then the narrator dreams that Parker thanks him. [No]
• Field notes on a marriage (Te-Ping Chen) - In the states, a male lecturer born in China suddenly asks to marry a female lecturer he's become friends with. They visit her parents who still live on an alfalfa farm. He doesn't want to take her to his boring Chinese town. He hasn't been home for years. He's rather detached. He tells tells her that at his school in China, a clever, poor boy died when a prank went wrong. 2 years into their marriage he hasn't made much academic progress. He hangs himself. She visits his parents, who hint that their son was the killer. On the way back to the airport they pass a block of flats due for demolition. The tenants are refusing to leave. Neighbours are bringing them food.
• Providence (Sara Majka) - 3 pages. In New York a single mother (the first-person narrator) becomes friends with a man whose wife has left him, taking their daughter. When the wife returns, the man gives the narrator up. [No]
• Good Progress (Jem Calder) - The narrator's mother's just been told that her breast cancer is terminal. The narrator (who's generally inhibited) hasn't told their friends, not even their flatmate Roos. "For motives that remained predominantly unclear to me, I had ...", "for no reason that I could have explained if called upon to do so ...". They go to a party. They think about telling people
• Visitors Welcome (Thomas Pierce) - A church buys a Jesus AI hologram. It challenges the congregation to be better christians, then somehow walks away.
• Vows (David Means) - The narrator's married to Sharon and has a son Gunner. They've both been unfaithful. They decide, after much discussion, to renew their vows and have a second honeymoon in Dublin. He thinks that much of what he's done is cliché. At the end it's a year since he held Sharon's hand as she died in hospital. [There are many flashbacks and flashforwards - e.g. "On the night of the party, months after the ceremony, Ted's loss of his son in Iraq was five years away, still up in the vapors, and he had no idea that it was ahead of him, and I had no idea that someday I'd look back and see both of us as we'd be years later and filter our relationship through that particular moment"]
• Schenectady (Adam O'Fallon Price) - Allison Blakely, the narrator, is in Schenectady teaching screenwriting to gifted high-schoolers, telling them how characters [i.e. herself] must change. The text is addressed to David, her ex. She's middle-aged, childless, and into drugs. Leonard, 13, invites her to dinner with his nearby gran. She takes the class to a shopping mall to do observation. High, she buys a remote-controlled helicopter. A few days later he shows her his screenplay about a women with an alien insid her. She asks if it's about her. He says yes, a little - his mother has problems too. She takes him on a night walk to a waterfall and shows him how to control the helicopter, which hovers like magic. [I like the symbolism and much of the story. I think there needs to be a stronger reason for buying the helicopter]

I like "Vows" most. "The line" does less than a story that long should. The other stories are mostly interesting enough.

"An honest man" by Ben Fergusson

An audio book.

Ralf is a geography lecturer, a parent. He grew up in cold war West Berlin. His mother was English, a psychologist working from home. His friends were Stefan, Petra and Maike (his girlfriend). His brother Martin is 4 years his junior. Ralph likes girls and (secretly) boys. He fancies their neighbour Tobias. He thinks Tobias is having sex with his mother. When Ralf's about to go to university he's befriended by Oz, 22, whose Turkish father is their landlord and runs a bookshop. Oz is an informant for the West. He's interested in Tobias (who he claimes is a spy for the East). Oz thinks that Tobias might be looking through Ralf's mother's files about her patients with sex problems (some from the British Army) so they can be blackmailed.

Ralf stays a night or so with Oz. Ralf's besotted. He passes for university but says he's going to take a gap year. Maike breaks up with him. He steals some of his mother's files for Oz. Oz begins to panic, thinking the Stasi are onto him/them - photos of the two of them together are left in his flat.

Oz and Ralf are attacked by Oz's brother and father. Ralf goes to Petra and tells her about Oz. When he gets home, Oz's brother and father are there. They say that Oz is psychotic and doesn't always take his drugs. When Ralf tells them about the espionage, his father says it's not the first time. Oz is taken to a clinic. A woman phones Ralf, saying she's engaged to Oz.

Oz disappears. Ralf realises he's taken a year off for nothing. He gets a shoebox of souvenirs from Oz's father, studies them for clues. It's 1989. His friends leave for university. Something in the shoebox makes Ralf wonder if his father is a Stasi spy. He challenges his father. Maike's mother dies. At the wake his mother appears and reveals that his father made her into a Stasi informant (they were in love, she was a socialist). They'd known what had been going on all the time. His father had had the photos taken. At that moment the wall falls. He goes to see what's going on. Oz is there. When he returns to his family they're about to leave for East Germany. They all go in the car until stopped by the police - Martin had phoned them. His parents are arrested. His father dies at 50.

Years later, Maike, Petra and Stefan attend his wedding.

I liked most of it - pacing was ok, and the facts about Berlin life were interesting. Sex/spy secrecy merges. Ralf was too head-over-heels in love with Oz for my liking.

Other reviews

• lonesomereader
• John Cook

"Modern fog" by Chris Emery (Arc, 2024)

Poems from Ambit, Bad Lilies, London Magazine, PN Review, etc.

Here's the start and end of "The Path" -

• All the no-shows picking their way/ through whin and leaf mould along the path,/ with England's wild attendance/ flinging or fleeing, will not remind.
• I have led you here through all possible music/ for something we cannot wholly know/ and you will pull up my hand and kiss it/ and carefully we walk on.

I don't understand all the first sentence - why "no-shows"? The final sentence's sentiment is repeated later. There are journeys, guides and things just beyond our understanding - "something lost" (p.14); "All that remains is absence" (p.12); "the dogs/ are astounded at the edge of what's never/ fully grasped" (p.12). Elsewhere the persona aims "to solemnise the marginal and lost" (p.61)

There's detail - universes in grains of sand. There are mere symbols (faded memories, souvenirs) of something that used to mean so much. I'm rather allergic to writing that's about things just beyond our understanding. Meditations aren't my thing either - which is maybe why "At St Helen's Ranworth" (a 12 part, 12 page piece) didn't grab me.

There are animals (dogs, marsh harriers, hare, fox, seal, etc) - observation, followed by a dream or their death. "Hares" is the easiest of these pieces.

Sometimes it's as if he feels the need to insert adjectives, so he scatters some in, hopefully. They work in "The lane tipped out beside dumped farm metal/ and plucked fields" (p.61) ("metal" is preferable to the more obvious "machinery". I've seen "plucked fields" before, but it's ok). I like "puffed vintage cloud" (p.47). In "we're out/ in cream air, old roads, lobbed estates seeping/ by the rim of each roundabout -/ the weedy local bypass, a single show house empty" (p.63) I like "lobbed estates" but why "seeping"? Some other lines have the sheen of poetry but I'm not always convinced -

• The dreamy sky is yellow, then russet under/an octave of stars (p.27). Why "octave"?
• I ask you if you/ understand the marriage of things when it gets dark,// you say the world belongs to itself for sure (p.27). Maybe. Borderline.
• No one told him he could make his deep mother/ from apple pips and spider legs/ in the latrine (p.31). Eh?
• We're taking pets from town to town,/ driving through thunderstorms/ in a garbage countdown/ to the metal noon. (p.32). Eh?
• Dawn's unlost loves/ curtained in sweeping hail. The slowest east./ Everything counting and counted that shoves/ from grey acres into one venal feast (p.74). Eh?
• all that sweet showiness we go through while May dies/ and another season crams its heat/ into the centre of you, grown so tall,/ then suddenly it is over (p.72, "Cow parsley"). That works for me.
• The government of my hours knocked back,/ staring at each maquette fried stiff inside its clock of limbs,/ the easel flayed with time and yet our sun-bare god had turned/ to spread new lies into each other (p.59). Eh?
• the dream so hot/ we formed a simple absence of ourselves/ in the reckless afternoon (p.50). Maybe, but by p.50 readers are overdosed on absences.
• He was slowly withdrawing from us/ nothing to clear the debris of him, the world/ relaxed into him with all its fiery prayer (p.53). Borderline but no - too keen to get "prayer" in.

I like the idea of "The establishment of the scene" whose last line is "Our end is your beginning. Titles. Snow". Mostly the book's line endings don't matter much though p.54 and p.66 nearly have full end-rhymes.

Other reviews

• Martyn Crucefix (The poems revel in describing aspects of this world and ... the occasions for such descriptions arise from journeys (often walking – the cover shows a hand-holding rambling couple) and the highlights of such journeys are frequently encounters with creatures ... There is more than a little of Philip Larkin in Emery’s work ... [In] The remarkable poem ‘Stags’ ... the momentary sighting of the creatures is (in the poem itself) now no more than a shaky memory, an ‘absence’ that stands ‘at the edge of what’s never / fully grasped’. But the recall of their passing still has a potency as a ‘store of grace and loss’ and is here declared ‘the last religion of these woods’.)
• Jackie Law (While the intended meaning of certain poems remained at times opaque, the language employed proved rich and pleasurable to peruse and attempts to unpick.)
• Jonathan Evens (The new themes he found included writing about spirituality, something, he once thought he would never do, and mystery – “the mystery of place, the mystery of the Other, the mystery of ourselves” ... The Path’ seems to sum up most fully the journey he undertakes in this collection)

"Flash fiction festival eight" by Jude Higgins & Diane Simmons (eds) (Adhoc fiction, 2025)

An anthology of pieces mostly by people who attended the 2025 Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol. Favourites include "Petunias" (Kathy Fish), "The Beachcomber's Daughter" (Karen Jones), and "Character wants" (Nora Nadjarian)

"The patron saint of lost souls" by Menna van Praag

An audio book set in Cambridge, England.

Jude, 46, works in Gatsby's - not a trinket/antique shop, but a place where people discover their talismans and wishes come true. When a half-sister (who she never knew she had) dies, she adopts Gertrude, 11, who is beautiful and has a talent for assessing people's problems.

Viola did a term at Trinity before her father died. "She always experienced everything twice: when it happened and when she told her mother it happened". She works in a restaurant and a cooking competition is coming up. She sleeps with her boss Henri, a competitor.

Matthieu, a lecturer, has a son Hugo, 11. His wife died in Paris 2 or 3 years before. Hugo still isn't eating properly. He meets Viola. They sleep together. Hugo doesn't warm to Viola. Viola wonders how Matthieu could have grieved while having to look after a child.

Jude has a conversation with her half-sister as if she were alive. She finds her own lucky charm. Gertrude suggests to Viola that she go abroad seeking a husband, letting Getrude look after the shop. Her drunkard father is dying in Addenbrooke's hospital. She and Gertrude visit him.

Viola loses the competition - she was late. Henri wins, and invites her to be his deputy in Paris.

One year later - Matthieu and Hugo, in Paris, are led to Viola's cafe by Matthieu's brother, Francois. Jude talks to her dead sister Francis again. Francois drops into Gatsby's and falls in love with Jude. He had an affair in France with Francis. Is Getrude his daughter? Viola returns to Cambridge and starts a market stall. Matthieu sees her there. Having given up her career for him, she move in. Hugo gives her his mother's notebook of recipes.

Big dollops of whimsy. Not for me.

Other reviews

• goodreads