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AND I DO NOT FORGIVE YOU

Name: AND I DO NOT FORGIVE YOU
Author: Amber Sparks
ISBN: 978-1-63149-620-2

STORIES AND OTHER REVENGES

by Amber Sparks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020

A collection with a goth heart beating beneath a cheerleader’s peppy exterior.

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Bite-sized fiction about the lives of women, from the far past to the present and beyond, who have been wronged.

The characters in this third collection of short fiction from Sparks (The Unfinished World and Other Stories, 2016, etc.) exemplify the famous quote from Muriel Rukeyser that made the social media rounds in the wake of the #MeToo movement: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” These are stories of that split-open world. In “Everyone’s a Winner in Meadow Park”—an uncharacteristically lengthy story for Sparks—a young girl living in a trailer park is haunted by the ghost of another young girl, who helps her navigate the turmoil of her hardscrabble environment. The daughter of an artist obsessed with making dioramas of female saints tells the story of her strange childhood and her stepfather’s murder at the hands of her mother (“The Eyes of Saint Lucy”). Many of Sparks’ pieces borrow from myths and fairy tales; in “A Place for Hiding Precious Things,” a young princess is transported by her fairy godmother to contemporary New York City to save her from a ghoulish fate. In “When the Husband Grew Wings,” a wife who adds a magic powder to her husband’s cereal that results in his growing wings is unhappy with the results. Although there is anger and rage in these stories, Sparks suffuses them with zingy humor at every opportunity. At their best, they balance heartbreak and wit. The pieces that don’t land are the ones where that wit grows cartoonish, such as the apocalyptic “We Destroy the Moon,” in which a cult leader’s wife persistently hashtags her own narration.

A collection with a goth heart beating beneath a cheerleader’s peppy exterior.

Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63149-620-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.