More Words = More Reasons to Revise

Big news! Little Patuxent Review finally upped the limit for fiction submissions to 5000 words. We’ve been gradually heading in that direction over the past few years, but this opens up LPR to even more great stories by talented writers who’ve been unable to pare down their pieces to 3500 words. I can’t wait to see what […]

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Book Review: Tara Hart’s The Colors of Absence

If the poetry in Tara Hart’s chapbook The Colors of Absence does nothing else, it should impel parents to reach out for their children, remembering to be grateful for the “maddeningly silken sack,” as Hart calls our babies, who may be grown, who may be young, who may be gone. The book is a journey from the erotic encounter, through […]

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Delighting in Doubt: Mystery, Crime and Spy Stories

Between belief and disbelief, certainty and uncertainty, trust and distrust lies doubt. Doubt can be deliberate questioning or a state of indecision, resulting in a reassessment of what reality means or a paralyzing suspension between contradictory propositions. An uncomfortable condition, as Voltaire observed, but preferable to certainty, which is inherently absurd. Or some surprising gap stretching intellect […]

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Book Review: Michael Kimball’s Big Ray

You know you ought to look away. The Brahma bull is jack-knifing like a crazed 18-wheeler. Any moment now, it will throw the rider up into the air like just another clod of dirt. Then as he lies flat on his back, trying to remember how to breathe, it will bear down on him with […]

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