Another Issue Eight contributor, Sheldon Lee Compton, offers a few thoughts on one of his favorite pieces from this latest collection:
“Rae Bryant’s ‘Featherbedding’ offers a blend of both the surreal and a familiar, gritty reality. The building blocks for this mixture is a steady balance of the hopelessness these two characters face and the way Bryant transforms the man and woman into huddled and hungry animals clinging to one another. But the other half of that mixture, that of hope, is what makes this story stand out in any roomful of great stories. The near closing moment, that final thought that the heat of their embrace might grow ‘a garden between their skins,’ can only be called tragic faith, something I’ve not encountered before as a reader or, for that matter, as a human being.”