A luminous meditation on Earth’s loveliest creatures and people enchanted by them.
Butterflies flutter prettily, sip nectar, beguile onlookers, spark love affairs, and lead souls to heaven in this poignant collection.
Editors Schwartz and Smith have gathered 42 short stories and poems that explore the impact of these delicate insects on the human mind. Some works celebrate and mourn their evanescent beauty, like A.N. Griffith’s “The Book of Wings,” about a daughter refusing to put her mother’s butterfly collection in her grave because “the thought of the butterflies never seeing light again was more unbearable than the thought of Mom being in the dark forever.” Casie Bazay’s fizzy romance “How Penelope Found Her Wings” has a restaurant server driving her car and braking hard for a swallowtail butterfly, only to be rear-ended by a handsome entomologist who specializes in the study of bees. Rebecca Linam’s whimsical Dragnet pastiche, “Butterfly Net,” follows two small-town detectives investigating the theft of a net and some columbine plants, which points to a kidnapping. Several pieces explore the caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation as a symbol of human change and renewal, including Paul Goat Allen’s tale “Chrysalis Rock,” which tells of a dying man who becomes encased in a cocoon and awakens to find the world wholly changed. Some pieces are infused with a magical quality in which dancing color erupts into everyday life, as in Jinxie R. Thorne’s poem “Painted Lady,” but sometimes the works fade plangently like fragile wings crumbling to dust. The best stories turn lepidopteran memes into intense drama, as in Kelly Grabovac’s “A Moth to a Flame,” a retelling of the Psyche myth from the perspective of Psyche’s sister Pythia, who longs for the love-god Cupid and bitterly resents the contrast between Psyche’s iridescent gossamer wings and her own drab moth wings: “Pythia grabbed two fistfuls of delicate, shimmering membrane, and tore. And tore. And tore. Psyche’s screams did not deter her. Pythia focused only on the glittering shreds of wings fluttering to the harsh rock beneath them.” Readers who are butterfly enthusiasts—and who isn’t?—will find this a captivating browse.
A luminous meditation on Earth’s loveliest creatures and people enchanted by them.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781964885575
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Wild Ink Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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