Robert Kinerk is a fine writer and one who has covered genres from hard news to very well-regarded children’s literature, rhymes to headlines, stage plays to lyrics, and everything in between. The gifted Cambridge, Mass., author has a new short story in the Summerset Review that made me blink in surprise when I reached the end…because I was startled to realize that I was in my own living room, not in the Central Square he’d created. Kinerk has been collecting string all of his life, from Ketchikan to the Atlantic Ocean, and weaves it into stories that stay with me like a long gallery of well-lit Realist paintings.

(The bio on Kinerk’s website has one of my favorite newspaper-guy stories…involving a lawyer and his un-housebroken Dobermans.)

–Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett