A short and often intriguing writing sampler from a Midwestern writer.
A debut collection spans a lifetime’s worth of poems, stories, and essays.
It takes a talented writer to maintain a consistent voice in a range of different forms, and Hurley does just that in this assortment of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, collected over the course of a long but sporadic writing career. The short story “The Broken Day of Bernie McCarville,” set in 1915, tells the tale of two men—an Iowa farmer haunted by his dead father and an itinerant coal shoveler who’s heading home to bury his sister—on a deadly collision course. Another, “The Second Drawer Revolver,” follows an opinionated 14-year-old, home alone for the first time, who’s forced to contend with a burglar. A series of vignettes, called “Encounters,” describes prominent figures that Hurley met during his life, including jazz legend Louis Armstrong, comedian Jonathan Winters, and even members of the British royal family. The poems address a number of topics, although aging, loss, grief, and death are recurring themes, as in “An Old Friend Dies”: “I am a hoarder of life, / a rejecter of strife. / When a friend-treasure dies, / denials of fact will arise.” Hurley’s animated language often holds readers close: “I have to warn you right away,” begins the aforementioned burglar story, which was published in a literary magazine in 1958. “I talk a lot—even for fourteen. My grandma says I must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” The poetry feels somewhat more antiquated, with its sometimes-inelegant meters and rhymes, but it’s nonetheless surprising, as in “Two Slow Murders”: “The neighbor’s dog was killed last week. / A gray coyote snuck and slammed, / An act for which it’s closely diagrammed. / We heard both dog and old man shriek.” The best piece is an essay about seeing Robert Frost speak at Loras College when Hurley was a student there, in part because it explains so much of his own aesthetic. Overall, the author successfully manages to put his many talents on display.
A short and often intriguing writing sampler from a Midwestern writer.Pub Date: June 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66417-644-7
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Xlibris US
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A potentially significant voice in African American fiction asserts itself with wit and compassion.
Eight interconnected stories set in a low-income Harlem high rise give faces, voices, and meaning to lives otherwise neglected or marginalized.
The Banneker Terrace housing complex doesn’t actually exist at present-day 129th Street and Frederick Douglass Avenue in Harlem. But the stories assembled in this captivating debut collection feel vividly and desperately authentic in chronicling diverse African American residents of Banneker poised at crossroads in their overburdened, economically constrained lives. In “The Okiedoke,” a 25-year-old man named Swan is excited about the release of his friend Boons from prison; maybe too excited given that an illegal scheme they’re hatching could endanger the fragile but peaceful life he’s established with Mimi, the mother of his child, who’s been struggling to balance waitressing at Roscoe’s restaurant with doing hair on the side. Helping her learn the hairdressing trade is Dary, the “gay dude” in apartment 12H, who, in “Camaraderie,” goes over-the-top in his obsession with a pop diva by getting too close to her for her comfort. “Ms. Dallas” may well be the collection’s most caustically observant and poignantly tender story; the title character, Verona Dallas, besides being Swan’s mother, works as a paraprofessional at the neighborhood’s middle school while working nights “at the airport doin’ security.” Her testimony focuses mostly on the exasperating dynamics of her day job and the compounding misperceptions between the White Harvard-educated English teacher to whom she’s been assigned and the unruly class he’s vainly trying to interest in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. (The keen perceptions and complex characterizations in this story may be attributed to the fact that its author works as a teacher in New York City’s public schools.) All these stories are told in the first-person voices of their protagonists and thus rely on urban Black dialect that may put off some readers at first, with the frequent colloquial use of the N-word and other idiomatic expressions. But those willing to use their ears more than their eyes to read along will find a rich, ribald, and engagingly funny vein of verbal music, as up-to-the-minute as hip-hop, but as rooted in human verities as Elizabethan dialogue. The publisher compares this book to Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. One could also invoke James Joyce’s Dubliners in the stories’ collective and multilayered evocation of place, time, and people.
A potentially significant voice in African American fiction asserts itself with wit and compassion.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982145-81-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women’s lives and new ways to tell their...
A collection of stories unified in theme—the struggles of women claiming independence for themselves—but wide-ranging in conception and form.
The women who populate this collection from the novelist and essayist Gay (Bad Feminist, 2014, etc.) are targets for aggressions both micro and macro, from the black scholar in “North Country” who receives constant unwelcome advances and questions of “Are you from Detroit?” to the sisters brutally held in captivity while teenagers in the bracing and subtle “I Will Follow You.” Gay savvily navigates the ways circumstances of gender and class alter the abuses: “Florida” is a cross-section of the women in a wealthy development, from the aimless, neglected white housewives to the Latina fitness trainer who’s misunderstood by them. The men in these stories sometimes come across as caricatures, archetypal violent misogynist-bigots like the wealthy white man playing dress-up with hip-hop culture and stalking the student/stripper in “La Negra Blanca.” But again, Gay isn’t given to uniform indictments: “Bad Priest” is a surprisingly tender story about a priest and the woman he has an affair with, and “Break All the Way Down” is a nuanced study of a woman’s urge for pain in a relationship after the loss of her son. Gay writes in a consistently simple style, but like a longtime bar-band leader, she can do a lot with it: repeating the title phrase in “I Am a Knife” evokes the narrator’s sustained experience with violence, and the title story satirizes snap judgments of women as “loose,” “frigid,” and “crazy” with plainspoken detail. When she applies that style to more allegorical or speculative tales, though, the stories stumble: “Requiem for a Glass Heart” is an overworked metaphorical study of fragility in relationships; “The Sacrifice of Darkness” is ersatz science fiction about the sun’s disappearance; “Noble Things” provocatively imagines a second Civil War but without enough space to effectively explore it.
Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women’s lives and new ways to tell their stories.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2539-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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