Dear STORGY readers, My name is Anthony Self – I’m one of the directors of STORGY magazine. We don’t usually write personal messages on the website but it’s with a heavy heart and great trepidation to announce some terrible news. We’ve been monumentally busy over the last six months putting together the amazing short story
If you didn’t know The Study Circle was a debut novel before you read it, I guarantee you never would’ve guessed. I certainly didn’t. Haroun Khan’s first novel is raw in subject matter and sophisticated in style. In an essay titled “My Political Novel”, Khan explains how the novel was a written over a two-year period.
Bindlestiff is one of those books that took forever to read, forever in a good way…I just didn’t want it to end. I set about each evening to devour more of this offering from Wayne Holloway only for my mind to shut down after a few pages – it wasn’t through boredom it was that
Who is Ezra Maas? Is he Daniel James the author of this ambitious fiction (or is it non-fiction?)? Is he a real artist? Is it a fake name that a group of artists hide behind? Or did James make him up for this book? These are some of the questions that’ll follow you as you
Adrian J Walker is back, following up on his wonderful dystopian novel THE LAST DOG ON EARTH with THE OTHER LIVES. This one is harder to place in a genre but no less entertaining and thought provoking. I’d summarise it as a metaphysical meditation on the current woes of British society wrapped up in a
In Germany 1934 the last place you’d look for a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl is in a Hitler worshipping all girls school, but that is exactly where you should look in Matthew Killeen’s Orphan Monster Spy. Killeen delivers a tense, frightening young adult novel steeped in a terrible chapter of world history. Orphan Monster Spy opens
* Topless and potbellied, Elmer glugs on a beer. He is sprawled across the butterscotch sofa. Still, he listens for Pinky, for the girl who hides above him. The plunks of her remote control. A toilet’s swill. A closing cupboard. Elmer, though, only finds bleak silence. His door unlocks, the hinges keening. Reggie shuffles through.
* Reggie troops down the aisle, sweeping up the remains of a wilted bouquet. He pushes petals into neat miniature piles and, for a mini moment, pretends that he is marching toward someone of his own. Yes, yes. I have seen him parade like this before. Each time he becomes glazed with hope. A speck
* Reggie spots Maria’s corn cart steaming on the sidewalk. He sees buttered cobs, silk, pails, root beer, salt shakers, napkins, salsa. “Hey, Reggie,” Maria calls out. She jiggles, clad in shorts and towering heels. Stray whiffs of corn stalk the atmosphere, swabbing Reggie’s face. “Hey, Maria,” he replies. She pumps and twirls beside her
* Reggie waves to the receptionist. Jo Jo leans through the fingerprinted Plexiglas window. “Your father came to see Dr. Dann this morning,” she says. “For his toe.” “Is he okay?” Reggie asks. “Yeah. It’s just swollen. And he’s, like, gained four more pounds.” “Really?” Her frizzed ponytail swings sideways. “He just keeps getting bigger
