The tense and atmospheric story, enlivened by Celtic lore, Appalachian legends, and killer zombies, captures the reader’s attention from the outset, beginning with the intriguing emergence from a deep, coal mine crater of the central character, a hapless government auditor named Darrick MacBrehon.
Bernardo Atxaga (1951-) is unquestionably Basque Country’s most prominent author in terms of editorial success and critical acclaim, and he has become not only one of Spain’s leading writers of fiction but also an influential voice for Basque cultural identity inside and outside of Europe.
Set in modern-day America, Rosson’s impressive, character-driven fantasy is focused on two tortured souls, both haunted by past transgressions and both seeking atonement.
Wall examines the darker alleys of human existence and the more questionable seams of Irish culture, politics, and social life, with tough-mindedness and compassion ironically well matched. He is rightly described as an insufficiently known Irish master whose work is astonishingly tender, eerie and, yet, full of human anguish and promise.
In Mark Mayer’s impressive debut collection of short stories, a circus or aerialist never actually makes an appearance. Mayer deftly applies the theme obliquely instead, letting the associations around the circus stand in for what is just beyond our reach, for the freak inside us, for our vanishing acts in relationships and in death.
Rogoff casts his characters’ lives through the various looking glasses of memory, memoir, and myth until none of the characters—and least of all the reader—can be sure of the details, only their profound importance. The facts remain shrouded, but the consequences pierce the dark, loud as a loon’s call, shattering moments of quiet reflection and startling narrator and reader alike into new states of understanding. There is vanity in thinking one knows another person, and Ezra must confront the unrecognizable heart of his closest friend in order to discover a new and deeper intimacy. It is here, in the gap between objective and subjective, rational and intuitive, that subtler truths emerge.
The world that Felver’s characters inhabit is cold and unforgiving, rife with poverty and violence. These are desperate, lonely characters waging their own private wars on the world: the couple in “Queen Elizabeth” wrangling with a devastating loss, the young brother and sister in “Evolution of the Mule” bilking travelling businessmen with a rigged game, the two boys in “Out of the Bronx” hunting rats and setting them ablaze.
When I was a child, I saw my father restrain my mother. I had been hiding behind the low boughs of a pine in the backyard, watching the argument unfold through the sliding doors that led to the kitchen. My mother, standing inside, had just thrown a glass tumbler against the doors with enough force to break the tumbler.
The Talented Ribkins, in some ways, can be taken as three impressive novellas braided together: the Florida treasure hunt, the Justice Committee years, and the heist years.
The women populating these stories fall anywhere along the gender and sexuality spectrums. They are also mothers, wives, partners, and girls who are in that awkward coming-of-age space that is a quiet horror of its own.