Radio host Keillor (Wobegon Boy, 1997, etc.) takes a station break and puts together this year’s Best American collection. Most of the entries, it must be said, are a long way from “above average.” The withering of the few mainstream journals still interested in fiction was a process underway long before Tina Brown stepped off the Concorde, but its effect is still being felt: the majority of pieces here have the sketchy, tentative feel of outlines, first drafts, or’sadder still—mere scribblings rather than fully crafted narratives. Many are simple recollection pieces, like John Updike’s elegiac, unsatisfying “My Father on the Verge” (a young man growing up in small-town Pennsylvania in the 1930s) or Poe Ballantine’s even flatter “The Blue Devils of River Avenue” (a shy suburban boy’s encounter with the disreputable family down the block). The “slice-of-life” genre is beginning to seem more and more like a sitcom in which nothing happens, although Carol Anshaw’s “Elvis Has Left the Building,” about the daily travails of a couple of lesbian friends, manages at least to wrap up several uninteresting characters in a modicum of wit. The more ambitious stories nearly all disappoint: Doran Larson’s “Morphine” offers an undergraduate rendition of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, while Diane Schoemperlen’s “Body Language” (on the less-than-blissful marriage of “he” and “she” from an anatomical perspective) is only slightly less pretentious. Among such company, more ordinary narratives like Tim Gatreaux’s “Wedding With Children” (an old man attempts to provide some moral direction to his fatherless grandchildren) or Akhil Sharma’s “Cosmopolitan” (an Indian immigrant has an unhappy love affair with an older American woman) come as something of a relief, if not much of a pleasure. For the trade only, as they say: a coffeetable book that few will want to crack.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-87515-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations,...
These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014).
The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi’s architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend’s two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton’s friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton’s co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche’s fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?," Dayang stars as ingénue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women’s societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood,” and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant.
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi’s stories are often cheerfully sentimental.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-463-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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