Well-curated, eclectic, and thoughtful.
A wide-ranging anthology of original stories from some of today's top authors.
If you’re a public radio stan and lover of fiction, you’ve likely heard of “Selected Shorts,” the program that features actors performing readings of a variety of short stories. Among the fans of the show is novelist Tinti, who edits this anthology sponsored by the program. The 35 original stories here are divided into three sections—“Departures,” “Journeys,” and “New Worlds”—and each has its share of delights. The first section starts off with Luis Alberto Urrea’s wonderful “The King of Bread,” about a fourth grade boy coping with the loss of his mother, who’s been forced by immigration authorities to leave the U.S. He navigates his relationship with his father, whose demeanor is “jolly rage,” with trepidation and care; both miss their family member but react to her leaving very differently. It’s a lovely, understated story and an excellent introduction to the anthology. The highlight of the second section is Omar El Akkad’s “A Survey of Recent American Happenings Told Through Six Commercials for the Tennyson ClearJet Premium Touchless Bidet,” a hilarious take on capitalism in the age of constant disaster. (“Tennyson Bidets: Life is but a grotesque carnival of unbearable pain,” ends one such commercial.) Addressing the Covid-19 pandemic directly is Victor LaValle in “Bedtime Story,” which sees a father and son in New York adjusting to life under quarantine. “The city that never sleeps,” the father reflects ruefully. “Well, that’s officially bullshit now.” The 8-year-old boy is suffering from depression and misses his mom, who’s left temporarily to take care of her own sick mother. The child insists his dad take him “camping”—in the hallway of their apartment building. The story ends on a hopeful note; like all of LaValle’s work, it’s beautiful and surprising. Anthologies like this are hard to pull off; not every story is going to land with every reader. But Tinti does a good job curating this one—thematically, it makes sense; the lineup is diverse; and it serves as a good introduction for readers looking for their next favorite fiction writer.
Well-curated, eclectic, and thoughtful.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64375-199-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Somers’ cool, intricate ode to millennial malaise satirizes the roles her generation tried—and failed—to outgrow.
Across two timelines, one imaginary and one real, a young mother carries out an affair with a dad from her parenting group.
Cora has a boring email job “writing about marketing,” and she lives upstate on “the mountain side” of town in gentle chaos with her husband, Eliot, and two children. When she meets Sam, the two immediately align themselves against the other members of the parenting group and set their sights on one another. “Two vectors ran parallel through Cora’s existence. One was what you might call reality, with bills…and the endless depositing and retrieving of children. The other was her affair with Sam, technically fictional, its lies and illicit meetings, the racing pulse of infatuation.” Somers describes both the failings and the familiarities of marriage with a voice that ranges from affectionate to ironic to downright acerbic. “Now that he was around all the time, she saw he was untenable,” Cora thinks of Eliot mid-pandemic. “His crime was being too near and too himself.…The issues that had previously seemed small and forgivable now seemed large and egregious. How he ate all the time. How he got stoned every night, rendering himself useless.” Desire for Sam courses under Cora’s everyday indignities with Eliot, occasionally erupting into the real world in a fleeting, illicit glance or a moment of confession. Somers’ approach to the affair is twice-refreshing—her masterful weaving of the imaginary with the real manages to juggle the banality of fantasy with scenes that are sexy or subversive. When the affair jumps timelines and threatens to upend Cora’s real-life marriage, she must come to terms with what the experience says about the life she thought she wanted, now that her secret life “had been brought to heel.”
Somers’ cool, intricate ode to millennial malaise satirizes the roles her generation tried—and failed—to outgrow.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781668081440
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.
A story of friendship, technology, oceans, and a small island.
Powers juggled nine lead characters in The Overstory (2018), his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Here he wrangles just four, but the result is almost as complicated. Two nerdish boys, Rafi Young and Todd Keane, bond in high school over chess and Go. In college, Rafi falls in love with Ina Aroita, a Hawaii-born Navy brat whose mother is Tahitian. The men fall out shortly after brainstorming over Todd’s idea for a computer game called Playground. This strand of the novel is told in retrospect by Todd at age 57, addressing an unidentified “you,” after he receives a diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies; he’s an unreliable narrator in more than one way. Interspersed are scenes in later years on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, scarred by phosphate mining and down to a population of 82, including Rafi and Ina and the novel’s fourth lead, an elderly Canadian scuba diver named Evelyne Beaulieu. Her lifelong love of the diversity and preciousness of aquatic life provides the book’s other narrative strand and its environmental theme. Through Todd, Powers sketches the computer and social media revolutions, from early coding to gaming to AI. The counterpoint to this high-tech history is Makatea, a paradise lost to industrial mining that decades later must decide whether to accept a consortium’s lucrative proposal to use the island to build floating autonomous cities. This is a challenging novel, fragmented but compelling, with fine writing on friendship and its loss and on the awe and delight the ocean inspires. Along with its environmental warnings, the book carries an intriguing look at the ways people and animals play, as in the boys’ competitive chess, the antics of manta rays, the allure of computer games, and what a meta-minded author might do with his readers.
An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781324086031
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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