Michael Landweber worked for the Japan Times, the Associated Press, the U.S. State Department, and currently is at the Small Business Administration. The author of We, Landweber is currently an associate editor at Potomac Review and writes the “Meet the (Small) Press” series for the Washington Independent Review of Books. His second novel, Thursday 1:17 P.M., focuses on a young man named Duck; as the story opens, it’s the day before Duck’s eighteenth birthday — and it may always be. Suddenly caught in a moment frozen in time, Duck struggles to understand what it means to be the last man left on Earth.

In her second book, Bystanders, Tara Laskowski, an editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, reviewer for the Washington Independent Review of Books — where she and her husband write the “Long Story Short” column — and author of Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons, explores the startling ways in which the day-to-day can disrupt and even unhinge normal lives. The characters of these 13 stories may not initiate the events that unsettle them, but once they sense disorder, their lives are never the same.

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