My Brother Swimming, in the Last Year of His Life, by Andrew Plattner

Prose, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features. These stories are like a pack of Polaroids discovered in a shoebox. They hold memories and images; they evoke how something felt, what it meant to be there. A son recalls a fire at the barns of a bush-league racetrack. A grown man goes back to a time in his childhood when he visited a playground designed by a world-class sculptor. A high-school teacher remembers a local restaurant favored by his family, and the time he spotted his father and a mystery woman having a spaghetti dinner. The characters lead recognizable lives; ones that hold both darkness and light. They attempt to find their way forward. Andrew Plattner lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and has taught fiction writing at Southern Mississippi, Univ. of Tampa and Emory. Currently, he is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Kennesaw State. His fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Northwest Review, Epoch, and elsewhere. Stymie, his latest novel, was published by Mercer University Press in April 2025.