After moving from Peru north of the Arctic circle to begin graduate school, Claudia Ulloa Donoso began blogging about insomnia. Not hers, necessarily – the blog was never defined as fact or fiction. Her blog posts became the bones of Little Bird, short stories with a nod to fervent self-declaration of diary entries and the hallucinatory haze of sleeplessness. Blending narration and personal experience, the stories in Little Bird stretch reality, a sharp-shooting combinati...

Claudia Ulloa Donoso is an expert at writing gently alienated characters. Sometimes, their dislocation is the result of geography. Occasionally, it stems from their social conditions: consider "Alarm," in which every sound and moment is skewed by the narrator's terror of her abusive partner, or "The Transfiguration of Melina," whose religious teenage heroine starts the story detached from her sexuality, and ends it anything but. More often, though, Claudia's characters are simply Martians:...