Description: Novel about a war waged by a group of balloonists against the month of February.

Here is his site: Light Boxes

Here are some of my thoughts on the book:

Light Boxes is a wonderful, strange little book. The book delights in the landscape of childhood fantasies and literature; there are balloons, kites, teacups, parchment letters, secret passages, and ghosts. With a palpable affection for these worlds, Shane Jones also explores the human condition, leading his characters through a cliffhanger that will keep you reading.

This is the kind of book that's best digested in one sitting. Jones has an intuitive feel for mixing the everyday with the sublime. The personification of February, the explorations of utopia and our own sense of mortality, put me more in mind of George MacDonald than Lewis Carroll. There is an archaic sense of loneliness, and deep sympathy for humanity, in Jones' words. Striking, visceral, atmospheric, and absorbing.

Kim Chinquee is one of the writers who first got me interested in writing short-shorts. These stories cut right into space; Chinquee's sentences are precise and intimate. There's an undertow to these pieces, a feeling of significance to each image and every word. They are beautiful marbles that read as planets. Just don't miss this book if you are interested in flash fiction.

Grant Bailie's Mortarville

Bailie's words throb like a missing tooth. There's a grainy, black-and-white feel to Mortarville. It's a book about a boy made in a lab, transported to a florescent world of dirty basements and distant longings. When I read Grant Bailie, I'm reminded of Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, but I am also reminded of Douglas Sirk and the black and white movies I watched on the late-late shows of my childhood.

Robert Shapard's Motel and Other Stories from Predator Press.

Reading Robert Shapard's short-shorts is like meeting an old friend and falling into conversation immediately. These stories are intimate and familiar; short fiction, like poetry, can make the reader feel the passage of time in years or in moments. I believe flash has as much in common with poetry or long, dense novels as it does with short stories. I came away from this collection with a sense of time as non-linear, looping around and around, defining the characters and re-defining them as the years pass. These are echoed moments.

There's a strange and wondrous sense of proportion to these stories; what would traditionally seem small is large. A child passes a disaster in a moving car; lovers are driven, in big- bug love, to love and hurt and love again; a child sits at the family table , on a warm june-bug Texan evening, and is forever changed. I cannot pick out one story from this collection to claim as a favorite. The stories work off one another in marvelous conversation. The book begins and ends with accidents and their ramifications . I'm in love with the sense of reinvention, of winds blowing through who we are and who we believe ourselves to be, in the story Deep in the Art of Texas. I grew up in Texas and this piece captures something about what it means to come from this big hot state. After reading it, I realized just how much the anthologies of short-shorts Shapard has edited over the years influenced my own work.