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THE ACCEPTANCES

Name: THE ACCEPTANCES
Author: Brian Prioleau

by Brian Prioleau ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Uneven tales with moments of brilliance and surprise.

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A linked collection of literary short stories investigates the tales hidden behind the walls of the nondescript houses lining a suburban neighborhood.

There is a strange anonymity to residential streets. Houses may be tidy or in need of repair, but other than these surface clues, there is little to give away the sorts of tragedies that might be unfolding inside of them. The college-age children of the immigrant family in the yellow two-bedroom spend their evenings cleaning the house to perfection while their mother compulsively watches stories about a refugee crisis on the news. The white three-bedroom serves as a makeshift motel where addicts can exchange drugs and sex after paying $8 for two hours. In the four-bedroom, a husband and wife dance around the old, terrible secret at the center of their marriage: “Every morning I wake up and it seems as if Jordan has forgiven me for what I did, though I cannot find the words to ask him directly. I spend all day in a quiet house wondering if it could ever be true that he would forgive me.” Each of the nine vignettes offers a new perspective on the varied and proximate lives lived in contemporary America. Prioleau’s prose is sharp and often lyrical, constructing complex psychological portraits for his narrators and their family members: “To a betrayer, an act of betrayal is typically an extended series of actions, like building a flimsy house. But this opportunity came in a single moment. Not a long, turgid series of couplets, an untranslatable epic poem. Just a moment.” Sometimes the book can feel a bit overwritten, particularly when it presents two or three of these bedroom philosophers in a row, but it also allows the author to craft passages of specificity and insight. This is a short collection at just over 100 pages, and only about half the stories really work—some feel exploitative; some simply don’t have enough of a narrative arc—but the ones where everything comes together are quite powerful. This won’t be a book for everyone, but it fits well into the long American tradition of myopic perspectives on the claustrophobia and hypocrisy of the suburbs.

Uneven tales with moments of brilliance and surprise.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: manuscript

Review Posted Online: June 20, 2020

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

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Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.

In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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DEATH COMES TOO LATE

by Charles Ardai ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2024

Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.

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Ardai celebrates the 20th anniversary of his publishing imprint, Hard Case Crime, by reprinting 20 of his own noir tales from 1990 to 2023.

Any collection this big is bound to be a mixed bag, but even the lesser stories here illuminate the formulas they depart from. “The Investigation of Things,” in which two Chinese brothers compete to solve the murder of a Buddhist monk, shows that Ardai’s gifts aren’t best suited to whodunits. The cancellation of a boy’s promised trip to see the circus in “The Day After Tomorrow” pushes Ardai’s ability to plot a short-short story to the limit. And “Nobody Wins,” which chronicles the gratuitously calamitous effects of a private eye’s search for his missing fiancee, has a title that would have been perfect for this whole volume. Ardai’s best stories walk a tightrope between noir fatalism and surprising invention. Some of them boast unsettlingly original premises. A fed pursues a doomed relationship with the grieving mother of a boy he arrested and got killed in “The Home Front”; “Game Over” follows a roll of quarters intended as a birthday gift; “My Husband’s Wife” showcases the coolly amoral voice of a conference attendee’s wife as she commits an escalating series of infractions. Other stories present endings bound to startle the most hard-bitten fans. “The Case” follows the adventures of a suitcase bomb that hasn’t (yet) exploded; a bodyguard’s search for a lubricious charge who’s disappeared from under his nose leads to a bloodbath in “Jonas and the Frail”; the man who hires a trio of contract killers in “Masks” turns out to have a shocking motive; and the ending of “A Free Man,” neatly balancing disillusionment and sentiment, provides a fitting close to the volume.

Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.