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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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