bookshelf

NEW AMERICAN STORIES

Name: NEW AMERICAN STORIES
Author: Ben Marcus
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7354-4

edited by Ben Marcus ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2015

For students of the short story form, a handy gathering, though it’s in need of more interpretation.

bookshelf

Middling collection of new stories, some by very old hands.

First, the quibbles: as with so many anthologies, the editor serves up a vague, vaguely celebratory introduction that is short on criteria and long on puffery: “I sought stylistic and formal variety in the stories not to be fair, but because there seem to be endless ways, in fiction, to make the world come alive, to reckon with our time, to fearlessly reveal what’s in front of us.” Well, as the kids say, duh. And what of the fearful revelation? There’s no room here for Stephen King, who’s a sight more interesting to read, most days, than Rivka Galchen or Donald Antrim but who, not teaching in an MFA program somewhere, would seem not to qualify. Robert Coover we have, and George Saunders, whose work holds up sturdily but who is now a flavor of the month all the same; and is Zadie Smith an American writer by virtue of living part-time in Manhattan? Marcus doesn’t do nearly enough to lay out the rules of the road. All that said, there are some excellent pieces in here. Saunders’ contribution is a bleak coming-home story in which a returned veteran of the Asian wars lands stateside in what might as well be a country song, with Ma’s new boyfriend insistently asking, “What’s your worst thing you ever did over there?” The most completely realized and honest piece in the book, it drips with barely potent rage: “I stomped the carpet fire out and went over to Gleason Street, where Joy and the babies were living with Asshole.” No mewling writing-instructor–in–existential-crisis piece can weather such competition. Coover’s story is similarly very good, inventive in its way of relating how time unfolds to a beer-clouded mind and packing a considerable amount of tragedy into just a few pages. The most entertaining, least mannered story comes from Kelly Link, who turns in a sci-fi tinged, note-perfect yarn of future discontent that would make Rod Serling smile.

For students of the short story form, a handy gathering, though it’s in need of more interpretation.

Pub Date: July 21, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8041-7354-4

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Vintage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NOTES FROM THE FOG
by Ben Marcus

- BOOK REVIEW
LEAVING THE SEA
by Ben Marcus

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FLAME ALPHABET
by Ben Marcus

- PROFILES
Ben Marcus

bookshelf

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

bookshelf

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

bookshelf

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

bookshelf

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.