Photo by Marcie Casas These days she moved through the world with the sense that she had either escaped from prison or been set free. The relief never left her; no matter what she did or thought about, it ran beneath—a current of euphoria at finding herself on the other side of captivity. A dozen […]
It’s the sort of literary paradox definitely worth exploring. And it may be the very essence of humanity that Wortman-Wunder has deftly described in this remarkable collection.
Crawford, like her characters, is not fearful, but bold and courageous in molding a novel that is unafraid to push the envelope of both our own expectations of genre and narrative, and how it should be deployed to expand a writer’s creative range. For readers, she tells a story that uncannily reflects the conditions of our collapsing world. Like her artist-detectives, we can investigate the terrible decay at the center of human experience, yet with hope and effort, we can also rebuild.
One might excuse oneself for reading it in a single sitting, as I did, finding it difficult to put down or forget. But it would be unforgivable, or at least odd, if one doesn’t find the volume a tour de force of classic and formidable craft as well as talent.
This is no novel. This is writing about writing itself that explores the intersections between the life, or lives, of the writer(s) and the written work(s). A ribald blast of immersion into the meta-poetic, if you will, which is only further compounded by the mystery of who is really behind this work.
Based on some similarities between the books and the characters’ concerns, it’s tempting to draw general conclusions about the state of women in fiction, but the most obvious similarity among these books is that their women—flawed, funny, smart, and brave—won’t stand for your generalizations.
Even with the harsh realities presented in the novel, there is a love of place for those who fight against racial violence or try to live benevolently within it. With its gripping mystery set alongside a beautiful rendering of what home means, The Gone Dead has wide appeal.
Meanwhile, Englehardt expertly traces Eli’s path from the little boy who can’t cope with his mother’s accidental death to the disaffected youth who enacts pain on others for no real reason other than that he has the power to. This path, in its crudest form, becomes the mythos of Eli the mass murderer—the story that the media tells about a troubled young man deformed by grief.
Photo by Tamaki Sono In the second week of medical school, we’re given cadavers. We name ours Aberforth, and I tell myself I’m prepared as I’ll ever be. The classroom is underground. The halogen-lit air fills with the smell of formaldehyde and other chemicals I don’t know the names of. “I know you’ve all been […]
The story itself belongs to narrator Samantha Peabody. Samantha Peabody, as she sometimes refers to herself, is an eighty-year-old bioacoustician, who has been living alone in the Pisgah for twelve years.