Arrives now The Hastening Hour, a freewheeling carousel of contemporary short fiction. Detached and understated, the stories, like the acclaimed "North Narragansett Road," "American Idol," and "First and Last," are meticulous in their nuanced portrayal of small-town themes, banal sojourns, and feckless characters. Rounding out the collection and serving as a richly skewed counterpoint is an arrangement of intertextual poems, fleeting sketches, fragments, and ephemera. A witty, sometimes genre-defying work by the winner of the Cervena Barva Prize for Poetry. (176/2021).