With verisimilitude, compassion, and a surprising amount of nobility, Skinner navigates the mean streets of New Mexico with...
Fourteen heartfelt stories about the hardscrabble Latino experience in New Mexico.
Like his contemporary Claire Vaye Watkins, Skinner (Flight and Other Stories, 2001, etc.) has a nuclear focus on a person's sense of self in the context of a physical place. He continues this style in these lovingly crafted short stories about the denizens of the desert Southwest. In “The Edge,” young Osvaldo and his crew of homies are partying at the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge when one of them falls into the canyon. Another story, “Solidarity,” bookends the male experience in a way. Two former campus radicals encounter each other during a job interview on campus only to discover how much old men change even while angry young men remain the same, often for good reasons. In “Looking Out," Skinner tackles the dangers of postmodern romanticism in depicting two young people talking about the sublime landscape around them. One asks the other, “If you woke up from your life, would you tell it as a beautiful dream, or as a nightmare?” If there’s a consistent theme throughout the collection it’s doubt in the face of one’s authenticity. Dedicated student Danny Sanchez loses his computer in “Backing Up” only to wonder if he deliberately set himself up to be drawn into gang life. In “Clean,” a junkie becomes so convinced of his own poisoned nature that, as his parole officer says, he just doesn’t know when to quit. It’s a photo album of desperate lives, but there’s a lot of poetry in the writing, too. In “My Dealer, In Memoriam,” a junkie considers his options after his dealer kicks it. “I’m going to have to start panhandling to scrape up enough change to score whatever filthy, stepped-on shit I can find on the street,” he tells us, knowing the score.
With verisimilitude, compassion, and a surprising amount of nobility, Skinner navigates the mean streets of New Mexico with cunning and grace.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8263-5627-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of New Mexico
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations,...
These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014).
The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi’s architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend’s two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton’s friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton’s co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche’s fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?," Dayang stars as ingénue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women’s societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood,” and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant.
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi’s stories are often cheerfully sentimental.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-463-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
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