Smart, dryly witty stories as absurd as they are devastating about life in the 21st century.
A debut collection that juxtaposes reality TV and climate change, social media algorithms and illness.
Samek’s stories often begin with assertions that place her firmly in the territory of magical realism. “At thirty-six I turn into a scrambled egg,” explains the narrator of “Egg Mother,” who becomes mushy from the demands of new motherhood and unresolved grief over the death of her own mother when she was a teenager. “It is not until my older brother is thirty-three that I learn he’s controlled by a puppeteer,” begins the title story, as the narrator realizes her brother’s confidence and masculinity depend on another person pulling the strings. In magical realist stories, metaphors become real aspects of the narrative as a vehicle for exploring slippery ideas and emotions, and thus Jeff’s puppeteer makes visible the toll of assimilation on children of immigrants. Other pieces tilt toward absurdity, skewering people’s willingness to trade their privacy for fame or turn their pain into profit. In “Sven,” for example, a woman finds an earpiece on a park bench and agrees to star in a reality TV show that warps her life, while in “The Sharpest Knife,” the narrator becomes an influencer after she falls ill during a pandemic and makes a name for herself by exercising while carrying her heart around in a canning jar. Though a few stories are flattened by being too much in service to ideas at the expense of character development, over the course of the collection, Samek slyly erodes our sense of what’s real and what’s not to reveal the cost to humanity when we offer our lives up for entertainment, allow algorithms to shape our desires, and consume so ravenously that our whole world, including our own bodies, are being polluted by plastic.
Smart, dryly witty stories as absurd as they are devastating about life in the 21st century.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9798217153572
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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