by Emily W. Pease ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2019
A compelling examination of what it means to survive when thriving seems to be an option only for other people.
The feeling of living on the edge of a breaking point permeates these 16 rich, finely crafted stories.
Set throughout the South, these stories explore themes of isolation and the monotony of daily life, especially when that life is lived slightly apart from the rest of the world. Pease's lead characters are often reaching toward something more: A reclusive family of faith hikes to a waterfall in hopes of healing a sick baby even though it's clear the life is draining out of his too-tiny body (“Submission”); a lonely young mother tries to find connection with her pastor husband’s collection of snakes and the girls who attend a nearby camp (“Primitive”); a college girl engages in a brief, secretive relationship with a cab driver in an effort to present herself as older and worldly (“The After-Life"). Interspersed between the longer stories are short bursts of flash fiction: a page or two at most that capture a seemingly ordinary moment only to reveal the fraught emotion tangled at its core. Though some stories are set as far back as the post–Vietnam War era (“The Blaming Heart”; “Church Retreat, 1975”), others hint at being more modern with mentions of Hannah Montana (“Birthday I”) and medical alert bracelets (“Hearing Is the Last Thing To Go”), yet all revel in the strangeness of uneasy relationships, whether with oneself or others. Pease’s debut collection is precise in its wording and raw and complex in its subject matter. Her characters are all poised at a precipice, though some realize this more than others, and are often surprised at how stark and ordinary the world is after a defining moment. Pease’s prose demands attention and refuses to let readers avert their gazes from the near-constant sense of approaching disaster, a steady thrum of quiet doom. And yet, each story is all the more enticing because the humanity of the characters is not overshadowed by plot.
A compelling examination of what it means to survive when thriving seems to be an option only for other people.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-938235-50-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
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
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
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
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