When I find an author I love to read, I will follow their writing from their first release to their latest. I recently reviewed Paul Beckman's most recent collection of short stories, Kiss Kiss, and it had me laughing out loud.

​His earlier collection of short stories, Peek, is also well worth the read.  It's funny and dark, literary and absurd, full of vignettes as well as touching flash fiction stories.  It's full of the taboo and what people tend not to say - not out loud, at least.

For a full review of the book, check it out here at Bewildering Stories.  While the stories are probably not for the faint of heart or readers who find themselves easily offended, it's a great read for the rest of us.  I'd definitely recommend it!

I had the pleasure recently to return to the work of Gary Beck.  I've read a number of his collections of poetry, and I was happy to dive into his recently released book of short stories, Now I Accuse.

The stories in this collection contain the same breadth of theme and tone as his poetry, and also a wide variety of topics and characters.  The descriptions arelovely and often heartbreaking, with a few lighter, humorous stories thrown in to balance out the tone.

For a full review of the book, including a detailed look at some of my favorite stories from the collection, please feel free to visit the latest issue of Bewildering Stories and read my review here.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

I recently read Paul Beckman’s flash fiction collection Kiss Kiss. Many of his stories are written in a literary style, although most of them also contain comedic elements, with one or two chuckle-out-loud moments of humor. Very serious problems are at the heart of almost every story, and it’s interesting how Mr. Beckman can turn these situations on their head.

Flash fiction has always been one of my favorite forms to write, and the difficulty in creating effective flash stories is that so much has to be left out to meet that word count goal. It’s what’s not said, more than what is. And Paul Beckman is a master at making silence speak loudly.

For a full review of Kiss Kiss, check it out here at Bewildering Stories. I hope you enjoy reading it!

I’m always excited to pick up a new collection of poetry by Gary Beck, because his work challenges the status quo and our preconceptions, examining issues both universal and personal. His new work, Perturbations, is no exception.

Sometimes morose, sometimes with brief glimmerings of hope, it explores a variety of themes, some new to Mr. Beck’s repertoire and some revisted.  For my full review of the book, you can find it here on Bewildering Stories.

If you'd like to learn more about Gary, I also had a great chat with him about his writing, which you can find on my blog here.

I really enjoyed reading Perturbations, and I hope you will, also.

For those of you who've been reading my book reviews over the years, you might notice that I'm a fan of Gary Beck's poetry.  He's a prolific writer and he tackles the most relevant social and political issues facing us today.  His new collection of poems, Virtual Living, is no exception, although it does take a new slant for its overarching theme: it explores technology and how it impacts society and the natural world.  That's not to say the collection shies away from Mr. Beck's usual themes tackling politics and the modern world, but it does so through the lens of technology and how it impacts people.  It was interesting to see Mr. Beck's take on tech as a force for change in all walks of life, big and small.

If you'd like to know more, you can read a full review of Mr. Beck's collection here at Bewildering Stories.  I hope you enjoy reading Mr. Beck's collection as much as I did.

One of my greatest joys about being a book reviewer is finding writers who are new to me.  John Reinhart is a poet whose work is fun and funny, in addition to being serious and thoughtful.  His writing mixes the speculative genre with literary, humor with pathos.

I read Mr. Reinhart's latest collection of poetry, broken bottle of time, and enjoyed it immensely.  The full review of it was published today at Bewildering Stories, and you can read it here, along with some excerpts from Mr. Reinhart's work..

I hope you enjoy reading broken bottle of time as much as I did!

I'm a bit behind in posting this, but I recently read a very intruiging collection of short stories called Lethal Kisses.  Edited by Ellen Datlow, it contains a number of big names, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Pat Cadigan and Michael Swanwick, to name a few.  As you can probably guess from the title, it's a collection of stories about revenge.  I would recommend it - there were some great and unexpected stories, and all were enjoyable to read.  You can catch my full review at Bewildering Stories magazine here.

I've known Edward Ahern for a couple of years now, and I was pleased to pick up his new collection of short stories, Capricious Visions.  A mixture of fantasy and horror stories, the writing is at times fun and other times macabre, but the stories always held my interest from start to finish.  I've written a more in-depth review at Bewildering Stories, which you can read here.  I hope you enjoy the collection as much as I did!

​I just finished reading Resonance, a poetry collection by Gary Beck.  You can find a full review for it at the ezine Bewildering Stories by clicking here.  I hope you enjoy reading both the review and Mr. Beck's poetry!