Innovators: A Review of Last Light, How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph An engaging book about six master artists who created and innovated until the end of their lives.The King Is But a Man: A Review of “The House that Madigan Built” by Ray Long Long’s often humorous, always colorful biography is divided into five parts, like a Shakespeare play, showing Madigan’s rise and fall.The Players and the Played: A Review of Miles Harvey's The King of Confidence Harvey’s book accepts no such popular, mythical understanding of con men, but rather builds more nuanced portraits of the players and the played.“Glow Hunter” focuses on a liaison between two women, while the postcoital exchange between Rick and Jill in “Starlite” details an affair between the two while both are married to other people. Although the narrator wants to make the new girl an outsider and pick her to pieces, the story eventually proves that she is quite the opposite. “Into The Fold” focuses on a new girl coming to a boarding school and the sorts of items they bring with them. These studied sorts of behavior give Parsons room not only to draw attention to the anxiety and tension within her characters, but what those characters notice in the world around them. Some of the other stories that stand out include “We Don’t Come Natural To It,” where a woman and her friend Suki sit in a restaurant and basically pretend to eat with Russ, who is “treating” them to dinner in a barbecue restaurant. The opening story “Guts,” the lengthiest piece in the collection, earns its placement as the first story with these qualities: it begins with a woman looking at sick people as if they’re radiant, and as more is revealed, her partner Tim is coping with a terminal illness. It’s challenging to create new terrain when human beings tread over the same events, so capturing a unique turn lies in the minute details, the poetic turns and taking readers elsewhere in a way that still comes across as credible. Part of the strength of these stories lies not just in the author’s ability to craft clear, descriptive, and at times, poetic sentences, but also in her ability to create people who may not be readily likable or predictable.

The futility of attempting to face down whatever they’re dealing with, whether the terminal illness of a partner or the awkwardness of living as a girl among other girls in a boarding school, heightens the conflict of each story.

In a way, each character faces a magnification of their own flaws as if they’re bright pieces of lint under a black light. Kimberly King Parsons’ debut short-story collection “Black Light” traverses the thoughts that women experience in challenging social and personal situations.

Kimberly king parsons black light