Often I try to find a shared theme to the month’s selections, and this month is no different.  The commonality among the pieces?  Absolutely superb writing.

Lea Banks, author of “Tricycle,” is one of those writers who can put so much affecting emotional cargo into a short boxcar of prose that you are moved at the same time that you wonder at the concision of the fermenting elements. This one is two pages long.  But it’s about twenty pages in terms of depth.

“The Stamp,” by Lori A. May, is an extremely well-done and enjoyable exploration of that ancient conflict, The Human Beings vs. The Bureaucrats.  It’s always an open question as to who is going to win.  I don’t want to give it away, so you’ll just have to read it for yourself. 

Gianmarc Manzione is a writer on his way up.  He’s working on an extremely promising book, PIN ACTION: Hustlers, Con Artists, and the Outrageous Men of Action Bowling.  One excerpt has already appeared in The New York Times.  I’m proud to be presenting another excerpt here, titled, simply and devastatingly enough, “Action.”

We end this month’s selection with “Duluth to the Lake,” a meditative piece by Mercedes Webb-Pullman, excerpted from a longer work titled Looking for Kerouac.  It is certainly a piece of writing that Kerouac or any other stream-of-consciousness guru would be proud of.  Allow the whole thing to hypnotize and bliss you out, until you come to the final phrases:  “. . . onto smaller and smaller roads, into the National Forest where the somber careful green pines below cornflower-blue sky in the golden afternoon highlight of sunlight lying sideways on the stubble of a wheat field surrounded by trees make the perfect image for contentment, the harvest is in and the sun shines, glory hallelujah and we fall silent for a while then listen to some Ginsberg while the trees rush by.”