Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales is set almost entirely in a region called the Mid-South, an in-between place appropriately filled with characters neither here nor there—not successful and not abject failures, not happy and not sad, not black and not white. Biracial men whose skin color serves as a kind of extreme social camouflage narrate most of the stories.
In this tenacious novel of rural Welsh life, death inevitably accompanies life. Without this dire, strained coupling, the characters in The Dig might have all they need, but this not how this novel, or our world, function.
In The Collector of Names Hicks once again demonstrates how we may confront death, loss, and non-being, yet still come through it without having averted our gaze.
The characters in Bewildered may never fully understand or control who they ultimately are, but Panciera’s stories suggest that this is really not the goal. We place our stake in the ground not to say, This is who I am, but only This is me in relationship to others. Like the proverbial tree in the forest, if we fall, it doesn’t matter if we make a noise if there is no one there to hear us.
Ever Yrs is an outward expression of one character’s introspection—the background of her very self as composed from the faces of those people who came before, especially her mother and father, her siblings, her husband, and even her somewhat estranged granddaughter.
In this novel, an unflappably confident teenaged girl prevails—through her ingenuity, wit, and a complicated system of self-defense moves—over each threat placed in her way.
In a moment when literary short fiction sometimes seems to be getting shorter and shorter, the stories in Jerry Gabriel’s second story collection, The Let Go, feel luxuriously long.
Lies, First Person is an extremely ambitious novel, which in the end does not lend itself to firm or lasting conclusions. Hareven has produced a work of dramatic and impressive contradictions. Between the two poles of questionable truth and falsehood, she examines such weighty issues as sin, guilt, forgiveness, Judaism, Christianity, motherhood, womanhood, violence, and especially the limitations and possibilities of art.
For a week now, in the apartment below mine, there’s been a tiny baby, brand new to the world. When it cries what come through the floorboards are the sounds of a catfight. Nothing human, not even close, but still the noise registers as child in need and pulls me from sleep by the hair. […]
Jacob Appel has been very, very busy. In his early forties, Appel is a lawyer. And a doctor. And a medical ethicist. And, oh yes, according to his author bio, he’s also published more than two hundred stories, collecting numerous writerly awards and accolades along the way. In the last three years alone, he’s released six books: four story collections, a book of essays, a mystery novel, and a literary novel.