Indie Spotlight: David Perlstein's 'Slick!'

“The emperor is naked,” author David Perlstein says. He’s channeling the boy from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor's New Clothes, but what Perlstein is really talking about are the strange truths that are the satirist’s job to lay bare to the rest of the world—if the world is willing to look.

Perlstein knows something about making people look. Until he retired five years ago, he made his living as a freelance advertising copywriter. His first published novel, Slick!, follows the beleaguered Bobby Gatling through a funny yet piercing take on American foreign policy in the ...

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Indie Teen Spotlight on Colin Haskin: 'Ferret Girl'

Colin Haskin’s young-adult novel Ferret Girl tells the story of smart, sarcastic Ontario teenager Fiona Forrest, whose family life is so darkened by her reticent father and absent mother that at times she envies the peace and stability of Bandit, her pet ferret. When she suddenly finds herself shrunk to ferret-sized and able to talk with Bandit, she and her former pet embark on a series of fascinating conversations and exciting adventures in the suburban wilderness. We talked with the author about fantasy novels, the craft of writing and, inevitably, ferrets.

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Indie Fiction Spotlight on Curt Finch: 'Magpie'

In Curt Finch’s debut novel, Magpie, young Ian Swansea first enters the employ of mercurial, accident-prone, award-winning journalist Arthur Magpie after saving the star reporter from a rampaging (and quite stoned) bull.

Soon Ian is “doing [Arthur’s] laundry, cleaning up his flat, feeding Gustave, balancing his books, pacifying his ex-wives, replenishing his liquor supply, traveling to ungodly destinations, stalling his publishers and feigning enthusiasm whenever he read aloud the poems of W.H. Auden” (“But then again, I was raised Catholic,” Ian muses, “and we do love to suffer”).

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