The latest release from Potter’s Grove Press, CRAWL CRAM GRIND FAIL by Bill Gillard is now available.

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What if we enter a black hole’s event horizon in a 1970s diner on a Sunday morning? If we turn the guitar amp up high enough, can we jump tracks to a parallel universe where that mistake we made here never happened there? Can a lonely farmer find the courage to open a door he should have years before? “A Name He Knew But Did Not Remember Learning,” asks who we are before we are conceived. What do we already know on the days of our births?

A boy with a devastating message to deliver to his father swims upward toward the surface of a dark forest in “Running Up That Hill.” “The Moose Depart,” tells the story of the planet’s least restless species long after everyone else has abandoned Earth for the stars. In “The Soybeans of Paradise,” an executed murderer tries a shortcut to heaven across a farmer’s field, and it does not go well. In the collection’s finale, “Like the way,” shows a past-his-prime English professor who shuffles off this mortal coil in the presence of ghosts from his past.

Spanning various genres and themes—science fiction, fantasy, myth, flash, time travel—these lyrical and tender stories push past easy assumptions about what it means to live a good life. They take readers on a journey from long before birth to youth, adulthood, old age, and whatever comes next.