Impressive craftsmanship and high imaginative quality distinguish an annual that’s becoming an essential.
Many roads are traveled in this sixth gathering of the best stories culled from the nation’s writing programs and conferences.
Novelist and critic Smiley (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, p. 782) approvingly notes the benefits such institutions offer to both writers and readers—and there’s indeed much to stimulate readers’ brains in the range of subjects and effects these 15 stories encompass. Unfamiliar cultures and faraway places are explored in Matt Friedson’s depiction of life in, and out of, a “Reeducation Center for Delinquent Youths” in wartime Vietnam (“Liberty”) and Jessica Anthony’s claustrophobic monologue spoken by a U.S. World War II soldier stranded in a South Pacific jungle (“The Rust Preventer”). In alien cultures closer to home, Melanie Westerberg delineates the complex emotions of a female aquarium worker attracted by the sleek beauty of sharks (“Watermark”), and Andrew Foster Altschul’s conflicted narrator wrestles with mingled empathy and rage at a shelter for abused women (“A New Kind of Gravity”). Conventional narrative is deliberately fragmented by the sexually confused California slacker who narrates Albert E. Martinez’s “Useless Beauty . . .” (a story spun from an Esquire magazine feature) and in Kaui Hart Hemmings’s story of an alienated girl’s attempts to describe her feelings about her drug-dealing father (“Begin with an Outline”). Realism is eschewed altogether in Jennifer Shaff’s ruefully comic picture of a bereaved phys-ed teacher whose grief is healed by a “visitation” from Star Trek’s Mr. Spock (“Leave of Absence”). It’s equaled, perhaps surpassed by, Michelle Regalado Daetrick’s beautifully paced revelation of a lonely boy’s guilt over the accident that destroyed his family and shaped his later life (“Backfire”). This little masterpiece stands out among several varied depictions of filial conflict (Amber Dermont’s “Lyndon,” Gegory Plemmons’s plaintive “Twinless”) and family unhappiness (Sian M. Jones’s “Pilot,” Sean Ennis’s “Going After Lovely”).
Impressive craftsmanship and high imaginative quality distinguish an annual that’s becoming an essential.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-602901-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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