A short, expressive lesson on preserving and safeguarding Black history.
In her latest novelette, Clovis guides readers through Black stories.
This second-person narrative places “You,” the reader, in Princeton University’s Firestone Library. You’re there to uncover and reveal Black stories before the librarian “captures” them for herself. The key to this mission is in her spectacles, which you’ll simply need to swipe from her face. Their lenses “can warp time and magnify distant galaxies of thought and experience.” They take you to a special world where language transforms into a visualization of ideas in a space called “the miracle of reading.” Stories connect the past, present, and future. For example, in 2021, Clovis sits in Einstein’s old Princeton classroom, where university housecleaner Carnethia, a Black woman, once studied Einstein’s formulas on boards and spoke to him about his lectures. The author links Black stories to such concepts as space-time and synchronicity, recurring themes in her work. These unique voices, passed from generation to generation, create a “circular field of dream time” where the tales are as infinite as the universe. Like Clovis’ preceding novelette, The Kingfisher(2021), this book is allegorical. Rather than focus on Black stories’ specific content, she centers on the importance of keeping them alive. Mutual understanding, too, plays a significant role; the spectacles the reader wears help Clovis, “the scribe,” see herself in her audience. Despite a largely conceptual story, Clovis weaves in tangible elements, equating heavy breath with a “200-pound gorilla” on the reader’s chest and offering a delightfully literal view of string theory. Moreover, her poetic passages brighten every page: “The synchronicity of ripples of gravitational waves that stretch and squeeze space like an accordion of music pulsating behind the spectacles of magnified time encountering planets, stars, and black holes in opposition.” While this book may end, Clovis assures readers that stories of people’s lives never do.
A short, expressive lesson on preserving and safeguarding Black history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 82
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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