Glimmer Train Stories – Spring 2004

If you’re looking for perfect prose, look no further. This journal of short fiction has achieved a solid reputation in the literary field for good reason.

If you’re looking for perfect prose, look no further. This journal of short fiction has achieved a solid reputation in the literary field for good reason. There’s not a clunker among these thirteen stories, each sentence elegant, each nuance carefully explored. To be sure, we are in familiar territory here—the protagonists populating these pages are coping with mostly standard problems like parental mortality and marital difficulties. But the writers in this issue explore this terrain so lovingly and knowingly that the lack of novelty becomes a virtue, like spending an evening with an old friend. It’s in the exquisite rendering of small moments that these master storytellers shine. Daniel Villasenor gives us one such moment in “To a Stranger”: “Now he could not remember the last time he had made love to her, and the thought of that would enter him as a train approaches a tunnel and enters and rushes forth, blotting out the light of day, and with its insufferable clamor, all sound and sense and recognition […] He stood as the thought, in all its violent and remorseless inarticulation, entered and passed through him, rocked back on his heels by the wake of it.” Moment by memorable moment, Glimmer Train puts together a quiet but wonderful evening of reading. [Glimmer Train Press, Inc., 1211 NW Glisan St., Ste. 207, Portland, OR 07209-3054. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $12. http://www.glimmertrain.com/] – DM