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STONE GODS

A celebration of the strange, cleverly told across stylistic forms.

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Golaski’s dreamlike short-story collection presents weird tales set in ordinary worlds.

Nothing is as it seems in these strange works. In “A Rainbow Summer,” for example, a child listens to their father’s story of Noah’s Ark, only to wake up the next day discovering that they are adrift at sea, surrounded by the sounds of wild animals. A man waits for his family to come home in the story “Stone Head,” but discovers that his house, and his city, have suddenly been overtaken by thick jungle. In the surreal “Little Stories,” a pair of editors for a literary magazine get together to arrange some impossibly frozen heads of lettuce. Golaski’s stories are uneasy in tone and vary in subject and form, but they’re unified in that each seems designed to unsettle and provoke the reader, revealing a mystery or image of unnatural transformation. In “Goddess of Loneliness,” written as a screenplay, it’s as if Golaski takes his cue from Ovid; a woman is a painting come to life, but by the end of the story she becomes stone. There’s magic in this continual transformation, this shifting of one thing into another. This story offers a helpful description of an artist’s studio as a “spectacular Francis Bacon mess,” and the transformation of Bacon into an adjective is a wonderful syntactic allegory for the way that Golaski transforms objects. Marys—literal and biblical—duplicate and proliferate in “Refrigerator-drome,” a story broken into small fragments that give greater importance to each piece, each image. In measured prose, Golaski’s work recalls that of H.P. Lovecraft with surreal shades of Leonora Carrington’s or Silvina Ocampo’s work. Logic goes out the window in these atmospheric, symbolic tales.

A celebration of the strange, cleverly told across stylistic forms.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2023

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.

Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

Pub Date: July 30, 2024

ISBN: 9781250899576

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024

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I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN

I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 1-888363-43-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997

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