by Alexander MacLeod ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2022
MacLeod’s second collection abounds with crystallized moments in time.
Meticulous prose and unpredictable characters collide in these short stories.
When telling tales that abound with changing fortunes, personal dynamics, and unspoken mysteries, it helps to know how to set things in motion. MacLeod’s collection features eight stories total, nearly all of which feature a compelling opening sentence. It’s hard to resist a beginning like “I am not like other people. And, most probably, I am not at all like you,” or “This is about me and my sister. Or is it my sister and I, or my sister and me?” MacLeod’s stories abound with characters dealing with delicate situations, from the narrator of “Lagomorph,” who's contending with an elderly rabbit, to the characters struggling to play a familiar piece of music in “The Entertainer.” These are stories where precision and specificity are both crucial. “The Closing Date” recounts a murder from a vantage point some years later, and its narrator—whose family was staying in a motel room next door to the killer—moves back and forth in time, chronicling the events leading up to the crime as well as the effects it had on him and his wife. It’s the precision found in that story, and the way it moves between past and future, that best shows what this collection can do. The peculiar narration of “What Exactly Do You Think You’re Looking At?”—whose protagonist observes that “the things that attract other people do not attract me”—also offers a memorably askew perspective on the world, as does the phantasmagorical ending to the otherwise realistic “The Ninth Concession.” The payoffs don’t always click, but when they do, the precision is a thing to behold.
MacLeod’s second collection abounds with crystallized moments in time.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-3746-0222-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 20, 2021
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
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A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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by Xochitl Gonzalez ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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