Katharine Haake provides a palliative for the shortage of thoughtful apocalyptic literature with Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld, a collection of eleven short stories, each of which explores the end of things—even if just symbolically—as a way to meditate on themes of loss and absence.
Largely ominous and somber in tone, the concise, intelligent fiction contained in Sleeping Dragons will move, intrigue, and not fade quickly from memory.
At its most basic level, Sonata is a thought experiment. It asks: What if Kafka were brought back to life and saw the late-stage capitalism whose arrival he presaged?
It’s easy to slip into In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees, but not easy to resurface. The meanings and emotive metaphors linger, a slow burn that brings you face to face with the injustices imposed on a people impossible to forget.
She wanted to be someone normal. Watch television until noon on the weekends. Practice soccer in the backyard so she could finally make the B team. Invite a friend over and make a slip and slide with the old tarp in the basement.
With The Lost Daughter Collective, Lindsey Drager positions herself next to innovative writers like Rikki Ducornet, Aimee Bender, and Donald Barthelme, who have used fables and folktales to achieve an ineffable effect.
Parker ably brings us close to the beauty and meaning in ordinary people and simple lives.
When I moved into my dorm freshman year, I brought my mother’s box of Daylight Savings memorabilia with me and hid it under my bed. I loaded those CDs onto iTunes on my computer and listened to them over and over with my headphones plugged in, trying to figure out some clue to who my mother had been. The music revealed nothing; it was empty, meaningless pop, and I could not understand why she had been such a fan. I desperately wanted to know her in the way a daughter should grow to know her mother, but I’d only known her as a little girl who looked admiringly at the person who fed and burped me, who sang me to sleep.
“You girls are so lucky you get to be Stephanie’s helpers this summer,” our mothers said as they dropped us off that first day late in June. “Can you believe it? You girls are going to be working for the greatest tennis player in America.”
Each little piece in the suite also bears a pertinent musical title, written in French, indicating the instruments to perform them and offering intriguing hints about the theme and tone.