Inspired by the lyric fantastic, a first fiction collection from novelist Vaz (Saudade, 1994), this year's winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Vaz's tales rely often on the yeast of her songlike love for language, which can transform her prose, influenced by magic realism, into poetry. ``Sex happens,'' she writes in the title piece, ``the way a pearl is formed. It begins with a grain or parasitic worm that itches in the soft lining until the entire animal buckles around it.'' In ``Island Fever,'' Vaz displays her strong visual sense and her wit: ``The mouths in the crowd, including his wife's, were chattering like bivalve castanets.'' These 12 linked stories about Portuguese ÇmigrÇs from the Azores also rely on the force of improbable events to propel them forward. In ``The Remains of Princess Kaiulani's Garden,'' a laundress with extraordinary powers at the ironing board positively affects the lives of her customers: ``One old lady put on a skirt ironed by Elena and could do cartwheels. . . . A priest who had sent in his collars to be starched preached the best sermon of his life.'' Vaz can induce in a reader a fine and effusive rapture when her characters, inflamed, are carried skyward by their emotions. ``Math Bending Into Angels,'' in this vein, shows how love and an incurable spiritual hunger lead a woman to turn into an otherworldly sprite. In other tales dealing with more worldly matters, the writer's whimsy sometimes fails to persuade: an ease in Vaz's luscious lyricism can, in an earthly context, appear too pretty; with her head turned by metaphor, the author comes across as unable to take reality seriously. At such times, she lacks conviction in the primal logic of an unreasonable fate that guides the major magic realists. She's also more sentimental than they, and her language can seem contrived, lacking a fundamental emotional connection with the lives she describes. Still, when the theme of a story is in balance with its style, the result is elating.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-8229-4051-5
Page Count: 169
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.
A gathering of short stories by an ascended master of the form.
Best known for mega-bestselling horror yarns, King (Finders Keepers, 2015, etc.) has been writing short stories for a very long time, moving among genres and honing his craft. This gathering of 20 stories, about half previously published and half new, speaks to King’s considerable abilities as a writer of genre fiction who manages to expand and improve the genre as he works; certainly no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid’s scooters, Ferris wheels). Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, with allowances for modern references (“Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the Judge supposes”). Pulpy though some stories are, the published pieces have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many inhabit the same literary universe as Raymond Carver, whom King even name-checks in an extraordinarily clever tale of the multiple realities hidden in a simple Kindle device: “What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one—or a dozen, or a thousand—where he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?” Like Carver, King often populates his stories with blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone: “Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.” Best of all, lifting the curtain, King prefaces the stories with notes about how they came about (“This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use”). Those notes alone make this a must for aspiring writers.
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1167-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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