One of the things Vollmer does best is highlight and sustain an act or relationship that would seem outrageous if he did not also immediately pull the reader back to everyday reality. The trick is slick, but it works, and in the meantime, his characters deepen and become memorable.
Christmas music at the mall, plastic reindeer in the neighborhood. Cards crowd the mantle with pictures of everyone’s merry children, sending tidings of joy and minor sports triumphs. At the airport, the holiday travelers funnel through—the excited, the weary, the primed-for-disappointment. Dora, the baby, travels from room to room in her portable bassinet, in her […]
Abraham Karpinowitz … reminds us of this history and its unique cultural elements with a masterful and unerring sense of the liminal (even vanishing) status of Yiddish.
Tim Johnston has crafted an intricate novel in which the reader gets to enjoy real characters in surreal and tragic situations. There is nothing more refreshing than experiencing human beings who act like human beings.
Cherry builds each of these characters with long (and important) histories, condensing novelistic character complexity into a short story.
There is no sense that this peculiar situation will end immediately, either for good or ill. The Pets is a novel that highlights the strange, twilight life of Icelanders.
She attempts this ambitious goal by producing a text that tightly weaves a narrative of apparent reality, faulty memory, and liminal fantasy, which are all so attached that they become indistinguishable.
Image by StudioTempura Listen to our podcast of this story here. Winner of the 2015 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Lauren Groff Birdie worked at the Rite Aid, and then she didn’t. Like snow clouds coming apart, it was that easy. All she had to say was “I quit,” and it didn’t […]
Each of the nine stories is fully developed and stands firmly on its own merits, and yet, because of the weblike interconnections between them, they have a novelistic quality.
The care with which she creates these seemingly ordinary lives is evident. She lets her characters live and insists that we care about them. And we do.