by Duanwad Pimwana ; translated by Mui Poopoksakul ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Earthy, spare stories that paint a bleak portrait of human shortcomings.
Thirteen short stories by a Thai writer making her English debut examine life under the strictures of capitalism and rigid gender roles.
In these stories, published in Thailand from 1995 to 2014, villagers, prostitutes, and wage workers struggle with the impossibility of their dreams in lives marked by drudgery. In “The Attendant,” an elevator operator thinks wistfully of a youth spent hauling cassava roots on a farm, in stark contrast to the atomized work his body does now, operating a deadening piece of machinery shaped like a coffin. In “The Awaiter,” the title character is unemployed, aimless, and hoping for human connection when he finds money next to a bus stop and waits for someone to come back for it. Those who hope for a glamorous rise to the top end up reflecting bitterly on their choices: In “The Second Book,” Boonsong becomes a promising politician thanks to his connections to a powerful kingpin; when that kingpin is killed, Boonsong’s hopes—both his political ambitions and, eventually, even his childhood dreams—are summarily dashed. And in “Within These Walls,” a politician's wife realizes, as her grievously injured husband lies in the hospital, that her life has been entirely defined by his choices. Because these characters are trapped, either by their circumstances or by their own obsessive thought processes, the prose is rife with repetition, an effective narrative strategy that can also become frustrating: “I was the one suffering from having to lay hands on it. Isn’t it twisted? When I hurt others, I’m the one that suffers; when others hurt me, I’m the one that suffers again.” Several of the stories are told with heavy irony from the perspectives of blinkered or boorish men whose foibles and fragility seemingly are the point. But these stories about gender also arrive at the most unsatisfying insights: In the title story, the sex-obsessed protagonist ultimately “realize[s] that, with women you’ll never stand a chance of sleeping with, it’s better to learn as much as you can about them, until lust gives way to other feelings.” Many of these stories, though punctuated with flashes of mordant humor, conclude with similarly pithy, oddly formal lessons.
Earthy, spare stories that paint a bleak portrait of human shortcomings.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-936932-56-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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by Flannery O'Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1971
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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