When We Were Twins
By Danuta Hinc
Plamen Press
232 pages

Good novelists write stories for readers to be heartily entertained. Exceptional novelists write stories for readers to become deeply thoughtful witnesses.

Flash Fiction America:
73 Very Short Stories
by James Thomas (Editor), Sherrie Flick (Editor), John Dufresne (Editor, Florida International University)

W.W. Norton
304 pages

If a novel is a deep dive down into the ocean of story, flash fiction is often a jump into a swimming hole: short, sharp, brisk, done. Even when engulfed, you can see the pond walls and river banks. The water might be warm, or cold, or filled with life. You might even touch bottom.

will the story never stop

stand proud, grow, wait

And our land is decorated with bloodied fragments of cement walls.

It’s so hard to live when they’re killing you.

Walking the Ojibwe Path:
A Memoir in Letters to Joshua
Richard Wagamese

Milkweed Editions, 2023
Doubleday Canada, 2002
205 pages

A heart, once shattered, can never heal back to its original shape. Always, there will be lesions and scars that keep it from beating exactly as it once did. Still, with care and gentle nurturing, a heart can re-form stronger, more polished and faceted than before its breaking.

BookEnds: Elizabeth Reed and Ann Bookman

“I stood before the mirror in my parent’s bedroom, admiring my grownup look, unaware whose shoes I walked in.”

An Uneasy Legacy

She’s paddling a canoe among lily pads when her grandmother’s heirloom ivory comb falls into the muddy water.