A meditative but uneven collection of tales about unfulfilled protagonists.
Three novellas and two short stories quietly dramatize the outward manifestations of inner, emotional struggles.
In the short story “Giselle’s Tears,” the finest in Eron’s brief collection of fiction, Bart, the narrator, is a high school wrestler. He is largely neglected by his two sisters: Rachel, the popular one blessed with both brains and beauty, and Giselle, not similarly endowed by genetic fortune but always ready to grab the spotlight with her penchant for emotional fireworks. While Bart is lost in the shuffle, he forges his own drama when a pretty cheerleader touches his face: “But if some men date their sexual practice from the first girl they kissed, I date mine from the evening Marian Leigh Anberg touched my face.” In a casually informal, confidential style, the author sensitively captures the significance of that transformative moment for Bart, one that would follow him years later. In the novella The Chimera in the Plaster, Kal Norbert, an unspectacular college dropout and the “butt of the cosmic joke,” begins an improbable sexual affair with Calla Dakos, a promiscuous woman who is both receptive and indifferent to his advances. Kal is compelled to reflect on what might be either her secret power or weakness and reevaluate what he considers the “Kal Norbert Type.” All of the offerings are delicately thoughtful, though they can meander too long without focus. In addition, the author seems to incline in the direction of a kind of moral didacticism—the novella Misguided Missiles, the most comic of the pieces, chronicles the attempt by emotionally beleaguered private detective Bart Coldecker to find some meaning in his life by becoming a professional wrestler. While the tale is a genuinely funny one and impressively inventive, it concludes with a lucidity that seems more facile than edifying. Eron’s assemblage of fiction is brimming with promise, but here that promise is only inconsistently realized.
A meditative but uneven collection of tales about unfulfilled protagonists.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-958015-01-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Contingency Street Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.
Pitlor ushers in her final installment as series editor of this long-running staple showcasing the year in short fiction.
Of all the kids at the literary lunch table, the anthology might have it the hardest. Wearing plaid with stripes, unpacking the random items in its lunch box—it’s hard for a cohesive personality to shine through, unlike those cool-kid single-author collections. But if readers are prepared for eclecticism—and since Best American Short Stories was established in 1915, we must be—these 20 stories have something for everyone. Guest edited by Groff, a seven-time Best American author, the collection includes some nods to short story royalty: Jhumpa Lahiri, Lori Ostlund, the late Laurie Colwin, and Jim Shepard are all represented. But as both Pitlor and Groff discuss in their introductions, Groff sent back Pitlor’s initial batch of stories asking for something “rawer, meaner, spikier”—stories with their own “weird logic.” (Groff’s description of this aesthetic preference lands better than her diatribe against the first-person point of view, which precedes 12 of 20 stories in first-person.) In finding weird, spiky stories, Groff leans hard—and often thrillingly—on early-career writers. There is Katherine Damm’s sparkling and funny “The Happiest Day of Your Life,” featuring a young husband freewheeling into drunkenness at a wedding reception for his wife’s ex-boyfriend. In Suzanne Wang’s inventive “Mall of America,” AI narrates a tale of corporate (and all-too-human) woe when an elderly man spends time after hours in the mall’s arcade. Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” recounts the tense relationship between two neighbors with a complicated history. In Steven Duong’s “Dorchester,” a young writer has a poem go viral after an anti-Asian hate crime.
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780063275959
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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