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THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2018

A strong collection of first-rate work without a false note. Essential for students of the form.

Latest installment of the storied short fiction prize volume, a going concern for a century.

There was a time, not so long ago, when short story writers were concentrating, tediously, on the lives of short story writers and their on-campus foibles. Horizons have expanded, and perhaps because it’s such a horrible time, the writers in Furman’s latest collection often tend to the horrible and its repercussions. In Viet Dinh’s memorable, ironically titled “Lucky Dragon,” Japanese sailors who ventured too close to the American H-bomb tests off Bikini Atoll return home to transmogrify; now monsters because of radiation poisoning, they are also the victims of superstition: “Already some of the villagers think that if they eat our flesh, they will live forever,” says one bitterly, while another so terrifies his wife that “She handled his bowls and utensils as if they were made from lightning.” In Jo Ann Beard’s “The Tomb of Wrestling,” a young girl, squeamish about animals anyway, spends time on her grandparents’ farm, where butchering animals, “food in its sentient state,” is the norm; as an adult, attacked in her own kitchen, she is forced to respond violently to the violence being visited on her. It’s a scary and all too real tale of terror. In Pakistan, the protagonist of Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Nights in Logar” happens upon a scene of carnage when a shepherd, distracted by a passing American helicopter, takes his eyes from his flock for a moment. A dog attacks so viciously that “he thought his poor little lamb had exploded from the inside out.” In a land of unending war, people wind up the same way. And as for Tristan Hughes’ “Up Here,” whose first paragraph ends, “We were going to shoot the dog. Or rather, I was going to shoot the dog,” you just know things aren’t going to turn out well.

A strong collection of first-rate work without a false note. Essential for students of the form.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-525-43658-4

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Awards & Accolades

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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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