Uneven but intriguing work from a writer who should resist her penchant for narrative game-playing.
Cohen (The Family on Beartown Road, 2003) showcases love in the Internet Age.
The 15 stories vary in tone and degree of realism, but all display faith in the “glowing and nuclear power in the word.” It may impact the characters directly, as when discovery of the name for his condition finally cures the protagonist of “Limerence” of his obsessive brooding over a woman who stops answering his texts after four dates and two bouts of sex. Or the power may be manifested in the way characters use words to misrepresent themselves online; in “People Who Live Far, Far Away,” the Icelandic yak farmer is actually a paralyzed vet in Duluth, the movie actress in fact cares full-time for her sister with Down syndrome. Or the author may just decide to flat-out dazzle you with words, as in the flashy opening of “Animal Dancing”: “It was the time of year when the helicopter seeds twirled down on the sidewalks like girls showing off at a dance, when the bee balm bushes wore their best purple frocks and the whole world seemed…tricked out for love.” Love may be fleeting, but a well-turned phrase is forever in Cohen’s clever but occasionally shallow collection. It’s not exactly news that people don’t always look like the photos they post online (“Man on a Boat”) or that it’s a bad idea to drunkenly hook up with an ex-boyfriend who tells you he’s doing drugs with a couple of other guys (“Love Quiz”), and the author is sometimes too eager to show off her technique. Nonetheless, the subject of looking for love online is still fresh enough, and Cohen is talented enough, to imbue the best stories—“Dog People,” “The Man Who Made Whirlygigs,” “The Opposite of Love”—with a sharp, distinctive quality as they show people tentatively using new tools in the age-old search for connection.
Uneven but intriguing work from a writer who should resist her penchant for narrative game-playing.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59051-582-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
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
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
