Sperber presents a clutch of short stories featuring strange magic and the landscape of New Mexico.
“Everything turns to poetry and impact, at least briefly,” notes the narrator of the collection’s title story. This observation, made after a coin trick–loving New Mexico ranch hand manifests a “melted pool of silver, faintly heart-shaped" on his chest after being hit by lightning, sets the tone for the 10 stories that follow. Most of the tales gathered here feature modern-day characters communing (or fusing) with New Mexico’s natural elements in some fashion. In “If the River Men Take You,” a woman reflects upon losing, perhaps intentionally, her engagement ring in the powerful Rio Grande. In “Why the Moon,” the narrator recounts glimpsing a boy riding a horse made of fire when her mild-mannered boyfriend literally cracked open his chest to show her the avatar of his inner passion—this explains why she “stayed with him for years and years, waiting, like the moon circling the earth,” for such passion to again reveal itself. Folksy humor is also present, particularly in “Our Master of Psalmody,” in which “the neuter down the street,” who “sings angelically the details of lust,” is banned from doing so at church but continues to attract a congregation. In these concise tales, the author conjures an impressive range of evocative and epiphanic moments, full of memorable turns of phrase to relish and ponder. “We have choices about what we carry with us. I carry my enchantment,” says the narrator of “Now, That’s a Trick,” a philosophy that also could be applied to this entire collection, which recalls the magical realism of Eudora Welty’s fiction. While some stories are inevitably less compelling than others, the journey Sperber takes readers on is intensely enjoyable and rewarding.
Poetic, thought-provoking flash fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2022
ISBN: 9781646629787
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES
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BOOK REVIEW
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
A quick, biting critique of the publishing industry.
13
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What happens when a midlist author steals a manuscript and publishes it as her own?
June Hayward and Athena Liu went to Yale together, moved to D.C. after graduation, and are both writers, but the similarities end there. While June has had little success since publication and is struggling to write her second novel, Athena has become a darling of the publishing industry, much to June’s frustration. When Athena suddenly dies, June, almost accidentally, walks off with her latest manuscript, a novel about the World War I Chinese Labour Corps. June edits the novel and passes it off as her own, and no one seems the wiser, but once the novel becomes a smash success, cracks begin to form. When June faces social media accusations and staggering writer’s block, she can’t shake the feeling that someone knows the truth about what she’s done. This satirical take on racism and success in the publishing industry at times veers into the realm of the unbelievable, but, on the whole, witnessing June’s constant casual racism and flimsy justifications for her actions is somehow cathartic. Yes, publishing is like this; finally someone has written it out. At times, the novel feels so much like a social media feed that it’s impossible to stop reading—what new drama is waiting to unfold. and who will win out in the end? An incredibly meta novel, with commentary on everything from trade reviews to Twitter, the ultimate message is clear from the start, which can lead to a lack of nuance. Kuang, however, does manage to leave some questions unanswered: fodder, perhaps, for a new tweetstorm.
A quick, biting critique of the publishing industry.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780063250833
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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