A wry and memorable collection of sleek fables.
Grimes riffs on the magic of glass objects in this debut fiction collection.
Glass can represent many things: clarity, fragility, artificiality, illusion. In these 17 tales, the author forms glass into all manner of ideas to beguile her characters and reflect—darkly—aspects of their off-kilter lives. A woman who lives in a glass tower welcomes in a wandering girl with a penchant for fibbing: She may or may not have eaten her own mother. A bookstore employee meets a customer who pays for things with apples and gives her a strange book made entirely of glass. A pair of brothers, both veterans, visit a museum of glass art, only to have the pieces draw out the long-simmering tensions between them. A woman treats an ailing wolf with glass pills that are meant to purify one’s insides. A girl is forced to care for her grandmother’s glass dog, who eats light instead of food: “There weren’t many lights in grandmother’s house (she said they gave her a headache), but the dog had a special lamp, a very bright one. You knew he was eating if he got hot to the touch and glowed a little.” In these pages, readers will also encounter glass turtles, glass coffins, glass pianos, and even a glass cabbage. In addition to all the glassy imagery, the stories are united by Grimes’ comic strangeness—the premises are always slightly dreamlike, and the dialogue is oblique, with inevitable intrusions of the humorous and the surreal. In “Glass Cabbage,” the eponymous crystalline vegetable found by a hungry woman in the woods is weird enough before it is revealed to contain a severed human toe: “When she turned the glass cabbage, rolling it around to see the toe from different angles, the toe moved, too. It bumped against the glass edges in a way that looked painful. But there was no one to feel any pain from it, was there?” Fans of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender will enjoy these original, abstruse folktales and the elusive magic that animates them.
A wry and memorable collection of sleek fables.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2024
ISBN: 9798218442453
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Grimscribe Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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