Stories that range from charming to simply macabre, from beautifully crafted to barely formed.
A diverse array of authors explore the heights, depths, and mediocre middle of human sexuality.
The first thing to know about this anthology is that it has a hook: The editors list the names of the 27 contributors in alphabetical order, but these names are not attached to the stories. The idea is that anonymity frees the authors and creates a fun mystery for the reader—although one wonders how many readers outside the worlds of writing and publishing will spend time puzzling over which entry is by Robert Olen Butler and which is by Helen Oyeyemi. The second thing to know about this anthology is that it is not a collection of “erotica.” It is true that each story presented here deals with sex in some way. It’s also true that there may well be readers who find “Woman Eaten by Shark Drawn to Her Gold Byzantine Ring”—a story that delivers precisely what the title suggests—stimulating. But, aside from a handful of stories—such as “Find Me” and “Vis Á Vis 1953”—these are not narratives in which explicit sex is the centerpiece or arousing the reader is the point. “LVIII Times a Year,” a glimpse inside the marriage of two deeply unpleasant people, seems to have been constructed to shrivel desire. “Now he thought of the woman’s gold tooth and ejaculated into the bowl” is the climax (sorry) of a set of scenarios called “Altitude Sickness.” In addition to the aforementioned image of joyless masturbation in an airplane toilet, these vignettes also include a man who can only get an erection aboard the Concorde and the first moments of what appears to be a plane crash. Set in a corporate-owned afterlife, “Asphodel” is a dose of existential horror that ends with an explosion of sexuality that may meet the Lacanian definition of jouissance but is not, in any kind of usual way, hot. There are some lovely stories here. The main character in “One Day in the Life of Josephine Bellanotte Munro” is a middle-aged woman who wants and who knows herself to be wanted. In “This Kind,” clandestine encounters with a baker allow a woman to escape the demands of home, but when he starts needing her emotionally as well as physically, she rediscovers the beauty of what she has with her wife.
Stories that range from charming to simply macabre, from beautifully crafted to barely formed.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982177-51-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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