The twenty-fourth volume of The Ha’Penny Papers’ print companion, The Rialto Books Review, is now available for purchase.

You may purchase a 12-month subscription of The Rialto Books Review here.

The Rialto Books Review Vol. 024 includes fiction by Meghan O’Toole, Steve Passey, and Russell Block, and includes poetry by Alexandra Block.

Please enjoy these excerpts from The Rialto Books Review Vol. 024.

Stripe!

by Meghan O’Toole

My sister is alive and well in the woods. I go there when the moon silvers the hay fields that slope up the foothills, dirty my boots with autumn muck: slickened gravel roads and decay of brown leaves. When the houses thin out and the path turns to grass–long, dewed blades that lick my calves–I cut left into the dense thicket where the woods begin.

A Night at the Wheelchair Ballet

by Steve Passey

Mike, back out of the military, moved in with his older brother Don in Don’s trailer. It’s temporary, just until Mike gets on his feet in his civilian life.

Wednesday night, or more appropriately Thursday morning at 12:15 am, Don’s cell phone rang. It was Tara, their younger sister.

Come and get me, she said, crying. Tony beat the shit out of me and locked me in a closet. I am afraid he’s going to kill me.

The League of Berries and Laurels

Chapter VII: Jeweler’s Row Part II

by Russell Block

Lydia and the jeweler’s son did go on their date. She dressed with her mother’s advice, borrowing a pair of her mother’s earrings, after they had discussed the matter endlessly over coffee, then lunch. Their discussions devolved into shouting only once, over the most trivial of details. She took the train into the city in the evening of her day off and walked to the steakhouse, not far enough from the showroom that you could not see its signage and awning within the restaurant’s marquee, where she waited, for the crowds of people to eventually produce that son. He approached from the opposite direction than she expected, coming within view, if she had been turned in his direction, while she was searching the faces traveling north on the other side of the street, and he announced himself to her when he was already under the warming lamps of the welcoming establishment. She was not taken aback by the surprise of it, as she even delayed her turn momentarily, finding one person’s way of walking peculiar enough to linger her observation upon the old man as he finished wading through a mass of southward facing forms. When she did turn, it was the smudges of grease on Vilém face that surprised her. His clothes were very fine, elegant in a way that the passing Chicagoans, in their loud suits of synthetic fiber, were not; but below his great coat, which was unbuttoned entirely, they were evidently disheveled by the demands of his day.

‘The Sleeping Beauty’ by Alexandra Block may be read in its entirety in Vol.024.

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