My review of Allen Learst’s debut story collection, Dancing at the Gold Monkey, winner of the Leapfrog Fiction Contest, 2011, is live at New York Journal of Books.
Excerpt:
Yet this isn’t a collection about promise and rebirth. Nor is this a collection about childlike anticipation or the gratification of the wonderful arrived. These 12 honest, brutal stories depict the ravages of war on the individual and ultimately on the collective whole and are more fitting to an opening line about gore and dismemberment and demons—images that go off throughout this book like grenades.
