here & now

New England is not only a place of dense woods and sweet-flowing rivers, where autumn leaves glow in the brightest colors imaginable, of Steven King crap and Nathaniel Hawthorne romances, it’s also the backdrop to Jason Brown’s second collection of short stories, Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work. Once you’re done drooling over that cover (which shows one of Jocko Weyland’s fine photographs, which you might have already seen on an older issue of his Elk zine), you’ll soon get sucked into a small-town called Vaughn with all its troubled lives and hidden drama. What’s even better: you won’t be able to leave this place until you get to the end of the book, because all the stories are loosely linked, and thus all the more addictive.