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THE PUSHCART PRIZE XLVIII

BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES

The state of the art, and required reading for all students of contemporary writing.

Henderson’s annual labor-of-love anthology turns 48.

For nearly half a century, the Pushcart Prize volumes have served not just as showcases for exemplary writing but also as mirrors of their time: In one stretch everyone seemed to write like Raymond Carver, in another like Annie Proulx. This volume is more catholic than all that in style but is very much a mirror of current concerns. Editor Henderson himself sets the tone by decrying the thought that AI aims to replace flesh-and-blood writers, direly announcing, "For the record Pushcart will reject all chatbot plagiarisms and will ban forever any human attempting to foist machine products on our editors." The 63 selections that follow are human, all too human. Sophie Klahr’s poem "Tender" mourns the merciful euthanasia of a young black bear burned in a wildfire, closing with her instructions to her writing students: "I’ll say a sonnet is a little song / to hold a thing that otherwise cannot / be held: a lonely thing; a death; a bear." In "What if Putin Laughed," Steve Stern examines the figure of the shlemiel as "the quintessential Jewish archetype," closing his essay with a well-worn but still up-to-the-minute joke told on Vladimir Putin by Volodymyr Zelensky. Matthew Neill Null delivers "The Dropper," a powerful short story that portrays a dog rescuer forever troubled by the horrors that people can inflict on animals. "You talk to your neighbors, you figure out right quick who’d’ve been Nazis," he murmurs. And in "The Blob," an essay that’s both beautifully expressed and downright depressing, Molly Gallentine looks at climate change in part through the lens of the 1958 creature-feature film The Blob, closing on just the right note as the title critter is locked in ice: Says a policeman, "I don’t think it can be killed, but at least we’ve got it stopped.: Answers Steve McQueen, "Yeah, as long as the arctic stays cold."

The state of the art, and required reading for all students of contemporary writing.

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023

ISBN: 9798985469721

Page Count: 580

Publisher: Pushcart

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

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INTERMEZZO

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

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Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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