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I must admit I would find it difficult to talk badly about this story if it deserved it (it doesn’t) as Karen is a friend of mine and, arguably, a large part of the reason life has resulted in me doing story-by-story reviews of a two-decade-old Mormon-short-story collection.
After graduating from BYU I joined the AML-List and [...]

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This Saturday at Claremont Graduate University, Sunstone West, a small tidier Sunstone Symposium, will feature panels about two Peculiar Pages book. (Note that times and participants are subject to clarification.)

The first, Monsters & Mormons, accomplished with the help of A Motley Vision and the most fun currently available in print. Participating authors Erik Peterson (”Bichos”) [...]

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1. Relatively spoiler-free backcopy.
“To Jordan Fairchild, the dark-haired girl renting his basement apartment seems somewhat quiet and reclusive. Just a business arrangement, he thinks, as he watches her sign the name ‘Nattie Hand’ on the contract. Though two thousand miles away, Celeste Betancourt, an attractive Georgetown graduate student he met through a mutual friend, has [...]

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Zarahemla Books is, in my opinion, the most valuable brand in Mormon letters today. I can’t think of another publisher (of any type) whose books I’m as likely to pick up just because of who them. And while I may never finish Hooligan (even though I have recently repented of my Douglas Thayer skepticism), Zarahemla [...]

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Or newish, rather. Harrell’s collection (A Sense of Order and Other Stories) came out in 2010 and Townsend’s (Mormon Fairy Tales) in 2011.
(Obligatory notes: Harrell’s book was originally given by his publisher to Karen Rosenbaum who wrote about it in Dialogue and then passed it on to me; Townsend’s was given to me with the [...]

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I don’t know what this story means. Maybe you can tell me. It certainly intends to tell me something, but I’m leery of drawing conclusions.
It’s starts off as yet another of those once-upon-a-time-in-my-memory-in-the-West stories, then suddenly throws a three-paragraph bit of essay at the reader, then ends with a new vignette from, oh, a couple [...]

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Stephen Carter’s 2010 essay collection, as you might expect, provides plenty stellar examples of the form, what with the personal essay being The Great Mormon Form (or so I hear) and Stephen Carter being Stephen @#(*&$^ Carter.
Before taking the helm at Sunstone, Carter racked up a few Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Competition notations, had [...]

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Before I can write about this story, I need to talk about Stephen Carter’s “Winter Light” (in What of the Night?) because as I read “The Week-end” I kept thinking This could have been May Swenson.
Carter’s Aunt May is one of the Twentieth Century’s great poets and she was an expat Utah Mormon living in [...]