The book is illustrated with the author's charming ink drawings, which have the feel of New Yorker cartoons...if only one...
A work of avant-garde fiction that makes The Wire look like a promotional video from the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce.
As the setting of the long-running television series The Wire, the long-suffering city of Baltimore became synonymous the world over with drug dealing, corruption and violent crime. With the publication of this book, Woods (No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear, 2012, etc.) takes it to the next level. A few samples of his narrator's observations: "The city council...by necessity, ranks human slavery very low on the list of the city's woes." "[T]he people of Baltimore were quick to squander a child's life." "My least favorite civic institutions, which, to my knowledge only exist in Baltimore, are dead animal lending libraries...." While these accusations clearly are not serious, they are not all that funny, either. This is a compendium of gruesome flash fiction pieces involving drownings, kidnappings, suicides, betrayals, heartbreaks and heartlessness, most pinned rather quaintly to a specific Baltimore neighborhood—Roland Park, Guilford, Remington, Butcher's Hill. ("To explain why his mother had killed his father, a promising chef in Mount Vernon....") These miniature horror stories, some about associates or relatives of the narrator, others based on rumor or news, are clustered around the chapters of an ongoing narrative about two men trying, in various half-baked and surreal ways, to locate their abducted siblings, each of whom vanished long ago in the same park in Baltimore. Well, no surprise, really: "[C]hildren have been disappearing from this city for years and years." Woods now lives in Brooklyn; Baltimoreans may hope he will turn there for his next inspiration.
The book is illustrated with the author's charming ink drawings, which have the feel of New Yorker cartoons...if only one could get the joke.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56689-371-8
Page Count: 259
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.
Characters from the fringes of society grapple with desire and fury in this collection of short stories.
Early on in “The Pull,” a story about a young swimmer from a war-torn country, the narrator describes her childhood as the “kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen.” The stories here are exactly that kind: insistently visceral, pushing into, and past, the reader’s comfort zone. Many of the stories center erotic experiences. In “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Bosch works in a modern-day fish processing plant, and he finds boundless pleasure in the arms of a young male co-worker. In “Cusp,” a teenage girl smuggles drugs into a local prison and shares her body with the prisoners as a way of being closer to her incarcerated brother. But if these stories teach us about lust, they also flip to the other side of that same coin: These are narratives full of deep rage. Some of this rage takes place inside of intimate relationships, as in “A Woman Signifying,” in which the protagonist deliberately burns her face against a radiator to create a “symbol” of her anger at her lover. Sometimes this rage is social, as in “Drive Through,” about an encounter with a panhandler at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Yuknavitch (The Misfit’s Manifesto, 2017, etc.) keeps readers’ heads pressed against what is hardest to see, and this doesn’t always land. Some of the rage can feel self-righteous; some of the desire pushes deep into taboo and veers toward unpalatable. But where there are risks, there are rewards, and these howls from the throats of women, queer characters, the impoverished, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity.
Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53487-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
