PublicationsAs Kathryn Dow
“Dow’s ambitiously imaginative debut novel questions the very nature of reality… [a] diverting exploration of metaphysical concepts. Winsome and smartly playful.” —Kirkus Reviews
When her father bumps his head and collapses, in Linwood, Iowa; June, 2006, Alma doesn't know what to do. And then she does.
Fiction
Mouse Wendler's account of her father's disappearance in Linwood, Iowa, June 2006.
"Chehak's prose provides a seamless, calm flow to a novel whose elements of love and murder ripple enticingly, fully surfacing only gently, only eventually, in the most satisfying kind of storytelling." -Booklist
"Haunting . . . Clodine Wheeler is the bemused narrator who strings together brilliant beads of descriptive phrases as she sorts through her memories . . . Chehak skillfully depicts small-town meanness and ironic generosity . . . . Her mesmerizing tale has classic resonances." – Publishers Weekly
"A dark tale of obsession among the posh ranks of a midwestern town... Chehak's poetic style exposes the passionate longings beneath the mannered sterling-and-crystal patina of Cedar Hill life; she renders both violence and love with an unflinching eye and casts a mournful spell." -Vogue
"Chehak is a very accomplished storyteller, always in control of her narrative, which moves ahead with grace and speed. But it's not only the plot that matters to this writer. It's the telling little details, particularly of teenage angst and of domestic life that makes the novel rich... SMITHEREENS is a novel fully worthy of the title thriller. It's hard to put down. It has a kind of dark allure." - The Los Angeles Times
“In Susan Taylor Chehak’s skilled hands, Iowa becomes the seething, steamy setting for a tale of pure evil… This is a marvelous, creepy story.” -The Kansas City Star
Short Stories
Now available at Amarillo Bay
Now available at Juked
available online at Folly
available online at
Word Riot
Now available at Guernica Magazine
read it on your Kindle, or your Kindle App
Online Projects
Nonfiction
|
The View From HereFrom such a height, clear of the trees and rising toward a silent, floating seven hundred feet, the humps and creases of the rolling Iowa farmland below the hot air balloon look to Leo Spivak like the folds and fur of a beautiful girl, and a young one at that, a virgin untouched and untried, his for the taking, lush and firm and full. She is posed in lazy recline across the lap of the land. A bank of clouds billows against the far horizon, completing the picture with its plume of white against blue, like her cast-off taffeta gown, silk panties, lacy bra. He can't help it that this is what he sees. Leo Spivak is a pilot and a poet and a ladies' man.
|
|