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GHOST PAINS

Erudite, eloquent, and bittersweet—these stories are like chewing on the orange rind for a last bitter taste of the drink.

Eleven stories of desire that traipse across their landscapes, rearranging the reader’s expectations as they go.

In Berlin, an American expatriate organizes a party, rescinds the invitations, and then finds the party thrown anyway with consequences that belie the devil-may-care attitude of the guests. In Krakow, a woman in tech with a questionable romantic past, and an even more questionable nipple piercing, runs into an old flame with a pressing problem of inheritance, atrocity, and identity that he’d love for her to help him solve. On Virginia’s Jefferson Davis Highway, a woman and her husband—a newly minted citizen—travel through the legacies of American history to visit her estranged Korean War veteran uncle who’s trapped by his own bitter legacies. Populated by fey expats, ardent psychiatrists, arch historians, and impossible friends who spin in and out of proximity to their narrators as they travel their enchanted orbits, Stevens’ stories echo with a kind of urbane fairy-tale self-assertion that encourages the reader to stop and gaze in reverie at the articulation of the scenes, even as the stories’ main characters go whirling off into their chaotic nights. Characters overlap in many of the stories. Rob the Ex in the punchy “Weimar Whore” is another character’s “kinky historian” in “Ghost Pains.” Sylvia who “lights up a room in her light-blue dress” in “The Party” is also Sylvia the hostile hostess in the final story of the collection, “A New Book of Grotesques.” Yet, even the stories that do not share this revolving cast of acquaintances or have a gridwork of city streets in common are united by Stevens’ impeccable artistry, which manages to overlay the gauzy romance of the stranger in a strange land atop the grim economic and interpersonal realities that so often accompany relative youth, relative freedom, and relative love.

Erudite, eloquent, and bittersweet—these stories are like chewing on the orange rind for a last bitter taste of the drink.

Pub Date: March 5, 2024

ISBN: 9781913505844

Page Count: 304

Publisher: And Other Stories

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

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INTERMEZZO

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

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Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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THE GOD OF THE WOODS

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

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Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.

One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

Pub Date: July 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780593418918

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024

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