One of America’s most underrated, important writers, Scott gets better with every book. A must-read.
The prolific, protean Scott’s latest is a collection of ten thematically linked stories that comprise an episodic history of love in the previous century.
The author’s pictorial imagination and gift for narrative economy are vividly displayed in the opening story, “Heaven and Hell,” which offers glimpses into the hearts and minds of members of a 1919 wedding: the demonstrably happy couple, the bride’s ne’er-do-well father, the benevolent uncle who assumes the latter’s responsibilities—even a burly retriever that chases a stick, endangering the life of the boy who throws it. It’s a precisely exfoliating anatomy of the pleasures—and perils—of marital love. The subsequent story, “Stumble,” is an examination of the wasted life of an “easy” girl who seeks happiness in promiscuous sex, and “Worry” looks at maternal love through the story of a warmhearted matron whose children seek risks that will free them from her smothering protectiveness. In “Freeze-Out,” meanwhile, “love at first sight” exposes a self-pitying retiree to the wiles of a family of amoral cardsharps. In the collection’s finest story, “Across from the Shannonso,” a bored apartment dweller can neither explain nor understand her eagerness “to sacrifice her father . . . for the sake of a hoodlum boy” whom her imagination has transformed from an arsonist’s accomplice into a brooding romantic soul. Scott concludes with two ambitious, only partially successful, experiments: a mordant novella, “Or Else,” which imagines four contrasting consequences for its unloved protagonist’s childhood traumas; and a gathering of several brief incidents, “The Lucite Cane,” in which love propels its variously connected characters into fateful chance meetings. Throughout, the author’s abilities to concoct arresting premises instill a quirky sense of menace and enrich her narratives with metaphoric and allegorical implication that keeps the reader riveted to the page.
One of America’s most underrated, important writers, Scott gets better with every book. A must-read.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-01345-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.
From the author of A Wrinkle in Time, 18 gemlike stories ranging from the small heartbreaks of childhood to the discovery of life on a new planet
In these stories, some previously published and others appearing for the first time in this collection, L’Engle explores family dynamics, loneliness, and the pains of growing up. In “Summer Camp,” children show a stunning capacity for cruelty, as when one writes an imploring letter to a lost friend only to witness that friend mocking the letter in front of their bunkmates; in “Madame, Or...” a brother finds his sister at a finishing school with a sordid underbelly and is unable to convince her to leave. L’Engle employs rhythm and repetition to great effect in multiple stories—the same gray cat seems to appear in “Gilberte Must Play Bach” and “Madame, Or...”—and sometimes even in the language of a single sentence: “The piano stood in the lamplight, lamplight shining through burnt shades, red candles in the silver candlesticks...red wax drippings on the base of the candlesticks.” Occasionally, emotional undertones flow over, as in the protagonist’s somewhat saccharine goodbye to her Southern home in “White in the Moon the Long Road Lies.” Overall, though, the stories seem to peer at strong emotions from the corner of the eye, and humor dances in and out of the tales. “A Foreign Agent” sees a mother and daughter in battle over the daughter’s glasses, which have come to represent the bridge between childhood and adulthood when the mother’s literary agent begins to pursue the daughter. On another planet, a higher life form makes a joke via code: The visitors will be “quartered—housed, that is, of course, not drawn and quartered.” While there is levity, many of these stories end with characters undecided, straddling a nostalgic past and an unsettled future. Although written largely throughout the 1940s and '50s, L’Engle’s lucid explorations of relationships make her writing equally accessible today.
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1782-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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