“surprisingly bizarre & unexpectedly touching collection of short/flash stories that deliver healthy doses of heartbreak, memories, weirdness, and violence”

RIFT received three new glowing reviews this past week! Co-author Robert Vaughan and I could not be more grateful for the surge in attention the book is getting lately. Thank you to everyone who has bought the book, read it, reviewed it, mentioned it, promoted it, etc.!

Gabino Iglesias, in his review at Dead End Follies, says:

“Rift is constructed so that each writer has an equal amount of space and they trade stories so that, instead of half and half, readers get four sections in which they alternate narratives. This works really well because it allows for the stories to flow nicely and for each voice to feel fresh every time it comes around. Fish is up first, and her work throughout the book is outstanding. Her knack for surprising the reader and writing about relationship as it were a new theme is enough to make this book one that all fans of short fiction should check out. There are many standouts from Fish, including Vocabulary, which puts an entire new relationship and its possibilities inside a paragraph, Grip, which pushes the boundaries of how much sadness and reminiscing can be crammed into a very short tale, and The Blue of Milk, which is at once gritty and incredibly haunting but also poetic and beautiful in the way only unexpected encounters can be. That being said, this is a review and one piece needs to be held above all other and given the space/spotlight of a quote, and that story is There is No Albuquerque, a narrative that packs the heart-wrenching biography of a pale-eyed woman born with a hole on her neck and three horns. This one is what happens when literary fiction, bizarro, and magic realism collide:

When I was little, my mother used to stand me before the mirror every morning and make me say: I am beautiful. After she died, I keep doing it for a while until Buddy told me to stop. After he married the Tattooed Lady, they soon lost interest in me, and I was sent to a foster home. My foster parents thought I was retarded. They told everyone who would listen that they saved me from a dumpster. I ran away when I was sixteen.

You can read the entire review HERE.

Gay Degani, in her lovely review at Heavy Feather Review, says of Rift:

“Imagine a coffee shop, something independent, unique, not part of a chain, where the air is filled with a rich, dark aroma, where the tinkle of music is subtle, underlining real conversations about real things. Now imagine a solid wooden table, highly polished by hand, scarred by time, yet warm with love. Stitting across from you are two writers you admire, not just for the skilled pieces of written art they create at their computers, but also for their humanity, their generosity, their views on the human condition. Who would those two writers be? How about Kathy Fish and Robert Vaughan? What if they were taking turns, telling you stories? What would that be like?”

You can read the rest of her review HERE.

At The Tavern Lantern, the blog for the lit journal Literary Orphans, Ray Nessly wrote another wonderful review. In it, he says:

“Simply put, Rift is a collection of stellar examples of an infinitely variable art form, by two writers at the top of their game.”

You may read the entire review HERE.

Many thanks to Gabino Iglesias, Gay Degani, and Ray Nessly!

*cover photography courtesy of Casey McSpadden