A bold, confident book that delights in written language even as it probes it.
“Elsewhere” is a fitting description of this literary buffet of a short story collection.
These tales are set across multiple countries and centuries. To give an idea of the range on display, the collection’s two best stories follow a woman falling in love with the Facebook page of a recently deceased stranger and a political plot among the disciples of Confucius. Even more impressively, Yan writes across styles to best serve each story. “Stockholm,” a story about a literary conference, borrows from the blunt confessionalism of autofiction; meanwhile, the protagonist of “Free Wandering,” a story about being overwhelmed by New York, is a direct descendant of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. This book is Yan’s first to be written in English, and language is a major theme throughout. At a meeting of the Foreign Movies No Subtitles group in “How I Fell in Love With the Well-Documented Life of Alex Whelan,” members debate the plot of a movie in a language they don’t understand. In "Mother Tongue," a couple of Chinese poets commit to surrounding their new baby only with English. But at 6 months old, the baby can speak only nonsense words, and it’s unclear if the experiment is working: “It was impossible to tell if they were Chinese or English, prose or verse.” Language is a source of alienation, a way for characters to be told they don’t belong. But it can also lead to new possibilities as characters find inspiration in misreadings. An Irish man with a Chinese character tattooed on his bicep believes the character reads home. In fact, it reads grave, and though it wouldn’t be difficult to fix, he decides to keep the tattoo as it is: “ ‘Grave’ is grand,” he declares. In an interview, Yan said that she relies on the distance of English, her second language, to talk about her mother’s death. In fact, a few of these stories touch on maternal mortality, a signal that the book’s themes of communication are deeply personal.
A bold, confident book that delights in written language even as it probes it.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781982198480
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.
A free-spirited woman forges a career as a writer and journalist, risking scandal and war zones to follow her heart.
Allende’s latest opens in San Francisco in 1873, introducing Emilia at age 7, the illegitimate daughter of Molly Walsh, who, as a novice nun, was seduced and abandoned by wealthy Chilean Gonzalo Andrés del Valle. Molly goes on to a successful marriage, Emilia grows up with a loving stepfather, and at 17 she begins writing, then publishing, sensational dime novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. By 23, she’s a journalist with a column in The Daily Examiner, though still forced to hide her gender behind her pen name. Rule breaking is in her nature, and while she accepts, for now, lower pay than men, she decides on a trip to New York to take a lover and learns to control her own contraception. Later, finally writing under her own name, she’s commissioned to go to Chile and cover its civil war from a human angle, accompanied by colleague and friend Eric Whelan, whose focus is the military aspect. Chilean revolutionary politics make for less sprightly reading, but Emilia’s individual encounters with members of high and low society lend atmosphere. These include the president, a great aunt, and eventually her father—now alone, regretful, and mortally ill. Although he disapproves of working women, the two share a “desire to see the world and experience everything intensely,” and when he offers to recognize Emilia as his legitimate child, she accepts. Now the story gathers pace, with Emilia—always and predictably the rebel—witnessing the horrors of battle, discovering that she and Eric are in love, and getting arrested. Not quite plausibly, she instigates a further sequence of impulsive moves before the story is permitted to conclude.
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593975091
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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