A powerful collection of intimate, heart-wrenching stories.
Silman’s short stories intricately explore themes of family, grief, and aging.
In “Here We Go Again, Alice,” Joereflects on his childhood and his older sister’s untimely death as he comes to grips with his wife’s pregnancy and his impending transition into parenthood. In “Labyrinth of Love,” set in the late 1950s, Muffie lands her first job after college, which leads to a sexual awakening and a relationship with a wealthy but insecure man. Dinah, in “The Scent of Lilacs,” processes her grief after the death of her husband and father of her two children, Max and Addie. In 2019, as Vera Schoenfeld reaches the age of 70, she opens her home as a B&B and strikes up a friendship with Simon Lang, a 76-year-old who becomes a long-term boarder (“Bed and Breakfast”). Laura appears in multiple stories, including one about hiking through Europe with her husband and their three kids, aged 5 through 13 (“On the Way to Courmayeur”); watching her children grow up (“Touchstone”) and contending with her elderly parents’ mortality (“Heart-work”) and with getting older herself (“The Sugar Road”). Silman’s collection of 16 short stories explores heavy but universal themes. Many characters are college-educated writers living in or around New York:They’re each their own person and easily distinguishable from one another. Throughout, the stories offer masterful and authentic representation of the Jewish American experience. The author’s deep characterization of Laura is especially compelling as she navigates marriage and motherhood. The tales focusing on Laura’s relationship with her parents—particularly her ill and dying father—are also engaging (“My Chilean Playwright”; “Her Father’s Voice” ;the title story). Readers will also lose themselves in the author’s evocative prose as they become immersed in each chapter, as in a description of an artist in “My Chilean Playwright”: “In the morning light bathing her face she has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. A brilliant sky-blue that she never uses in her work. Is that because there are no blue fruits or vegetables, or because she has enough blue in her life?”
A powerful collection of intimate, heart-wrenching stories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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