Two new reviews of How the Broken Lead the Blind and one of The Collectors have appeared online today, all of which I've gratefully rounded up into this single post. Thanks to editors Tania Hershman at The Short Review and John Madera at The Chapbook Review for selecting my chapbook for How the Broken Lead the Blind to be reviewed in their new issues.

At The Short Review, Steven Wingate reviewed the book, saying in part:

Many of these stories take place in a personal limbo, on a razor’s edge where things could turn out well or turn out badly. We don’t usually stick around to learn the result, but Bell gives us enough to go on. In the title story, a blind woman whose seeing eye dog has been spoiled from too many treats goes running and experiences a delicious loss of control before her inevitable crash. On a sentence level throughout the collection, Bell finds moments like these and uses propulsive, almost metrical language—often with skillful short sentences—to create from them the sense of foreboding and imminent surprise we have come to expect from flash fiction.

The rest of this month's issue includes reviews of Barry Graham, Nam Le, Josephine Rowe, Anne Donovan, Ali Smith, Mathias B. Freese, Pat Jourdan, and Daniyal Mueenuddin, as well as interviews with myself and some of the above writers. The Short Review is a fantastic publication and resource for short story readers, and I'm very excited to be reviewed in their pages.

At The Chapbook Review, Sean Lovelace's review from his blog is reprinted, including his many hilarious photographic illustrations. Here's an excerpt from his review:

Surely, “How the Broken Lead the Blind Until They Both Become Something Else Entirely” (Jesus, what a title!) is the best work in the chapbook. It flows, it blooms, runs forward like the endearing and rather remarkable characters of a blind woman, her seeing-eye dog, both on “new found running legs,” both “accidental artists” in their running free, acceleration and verve, embrace of possibility, of crash, of actual free-will-ness–finally. Everything about this story is surprising, yet inevitable. A well-wrought thing, this art.

The rest of The Chapbook Review's first issue contains interviews with Christopher Higgs and Blake Butler as well as reviews of chapbooks by Aaron Burch, Ryan Call, Lawrence Millman, Alan Catlin, Shya Scanlon, and Mike Heppner. Congratulations to John Madera on this first issue, and to all the writers and reviewers included within. This is an important and increasingly exciting subset of publishing, and its great to have a dedicated resource like this to cover it. I'll be reviewing a chapbook for them myself in next month's issue.

The Collectors also got reviewed this week, by Ryan W. Bradley at his blog North Punk Press Reviews. Here's an excerpt from his post about the book:

"How long has Homer been sitting here in the dark?" The story begins, and by the end the reader is left wondering the same thing, but not just about Homer, about themselves as well. Homer's darkness is not just the physical lack of light, or the depressing state in which we discover his life, no, it is the nature of growing old. Homer and Langley have grown old together, clutching their disappointments, the way they hang on to their posessions. In this way they are a cautionary tale, one the first person narrator affirms when he says, "Once, I wanted to be just like them."

Thanks so much to Ryan for taking the time to read the book and to write about it-- I appreciate these kind of blog post reviews and mentions from individual writers and bloggers more than I can tell.

How the Broken Lead the Blind and The Collectors are both sold out, but you can read How the Broken Lead the Blind as a free PDF download or on Issuu as an e-book, and The Collectors will be reissued in a similar electronic format later this year.

Thanks again to Steven Wingate and Sean Lovelace and Ryan W. Bradley for their kind words, and to Tania Hershman at The Short Review and John Madera at The Chapbook Review for all the hard work they do on their respective publications.