As ever, a welcome portrait of the state of the art in contemporary short fiction writing, a literature of resistance.
Politically charged, diverse installment of the long-running literary annual.
Writes general editor Pitlor, American fiction writers today work in an atmosphere of political decline, racism, corruption, and casual violence, and consequently they “are now faced with the significant challenge of producing work that will sustain a reader’s attention amid this larger narrative.” Adds volume editor Gay, who read 120 submissions to make this anthology, “I thought about this cultural moment and what it means to both write politically and read politically.” The stories included here are of a uniformly high quality, without a dud among them, though it has to be said that only some of them are overt in their political stance, even if many concern the lives of those who are essentially powerless in an American arena that has become truly Darwinian. On that note, the opening story concerns a young man who, living in a trailer on the edge of a Montana forest, must face two essential losses, one the disappearance of his father (“One member of the search committee, a homeless asshole there for the free lunch, pulled me aside and told me it was 'them aliens’ who took my father”), the other the death of the family dog via a mountain lion that, after all, is just doing its job. Maria Anderson’s "Cougar," from the Iowa Review, is a masterpiece of charged compression; there’s a lot happening in the space of just a few pages. Other standouts are Esmé Weijun Wang’s “What Terrible Thing It Was,” a delicate story of madness (“Even knowing that I am not alone would be its own strange balm”) that could just as easily appear in a horror anthology, and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “Control Negro,” whose double-edged title speaks volumes to the terrible price an African-American pays for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As ever, a welcome portrait of the state of the art in contemporary short fiction writing, a literature of resistance.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-58288-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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