Propulsive and complex, this is a gorgeously written debut.
A collection of stories that examine coming of age, family, and Diné life.
The book opens with "Dormant," in which 17-year-old Bernadine becomes involved in a relationship with 24-year-old Aaron after helping him rescue an abandoned kitten. Bernadine considers her mother’s choice in men who are always “jailbirds” and what her future might look like with Aaron, a white man. “Interracial couples always had a hard time on the reservation, especially when the woman was Navajo,” she notes. This theme of the expectations imposed on Navajo women recurs several times; the stories look closely at the connections between self and community and also provide a view of reservation life and traditions. In "The Casket in the Backseat," a man gets a ride from a hearse and discovers his grandfather’s spirit is trapped in the casket. In "Snow Bath Season," a dead mother speaks to her daughter through Amazon’s Alexa. In the title story, a teen witnesses the disappearance of Miss Northwestern Arizona. These ingenious tales are rangy in their scope and form. “Under the Porchway” is notable for the way it interweaves plot with instructions for how to butcher a sheep. The author's sharp prose is amplified by extraordinary similes such as “roots clenched into the earth like wiry brown fists” and “veins clung in clusters beneath the skin of their hands like turquoise squash blossoms.” Not only are the metaphors and similes surprising, but the turns within each story are as well. Just when it feels like a plot might move into a familiar trope, it upends itself in the best way. The stories don’t provide tidy resolutions, but they reveal essential truths about the continued effects of colonization on Indigenous people, including the lack of resources on tribal lands, ongoing mental health and substance abuse crises, violence against women, and Indigenous women going missing.
Propulsive and complex, this is a gorgeously written debut.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781948814850
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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