A refreshingly original collection of sharp tales.
An amusing anthology of writing about travel from the online journal The Lowestoft Chronicle.
In this new collection, editor Litchfield presents a selection of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews about journeys. Each writer offers a pair of works, with the book opening with “Just Entering Darkness, Missouri” by Jeff Burt, a piece of short fiction in which a father and son road trip results in an unexpected, menacing confrontation. The tales, real or imagined, can lead anywhere, from Parisian pinball haunts to the seedy underbelly of postwar Manhattan. One of 18 poems offered here, “Making Sense” by Linda Ankrah-Dove is a delightful mashup of Homer’s Odyssey and the lyrics of Bob Dylan. Two interviews are also included: a conversation with historical novelist Sheldon Russell and another with Abby Frucht, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Creative nonfiction offerings include Catherine Dowling’s “Two Halves of a Whole,” about her attending a writers’ workshop in Alaska to experience the territory away from the tourist trail. Among the many standout works is Tim Frank’s “Three Strikes,” whose premise—about a London Underground driver actively seeking his third kill so he’ll be eligible for indefinite leave—is inventively and uncomfortably dark, and readers will savor its devilish twist. Meanwhile, poems such as “Woman With the Red Carry-On” are drolly perceptive: “Why must I take six undies / for a two night stay?” Other descriptive passages, such as this one in “Just Entering Darkness, Missouri,” will make the reader recoil and snort with laughter simultaneously: “I examined one large jar of goose pickles, expecting the brine to be the color of urine, but if it was urine, the dark brown belied some type of illness.” Readers may be disappointed at the dearth of female fiction writers here, but, by and large, the work features a wide array of voices. Overall, it’s entertaining, varied, and clever writing.
A refreshingly original collection of sharp tales.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73233-282-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lowestoft Chronicle Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Oddly exquisite.
Part essay, part story, part diatribe, part diary—even part dictionary—this book defies definition.
The narrators of this collection—a loose compilation of short works cut from Gen Z angst and internet gobbledygook—share more than a milieu. In “Love Story,” the fairytales of our youth are supplanted, “Once upon a time” replaced with “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero....She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl.” Later on, “Halloween Forever” showcases another form of affection, that between an internet rabbit-hole denizen and “her” FBI agent, the one the meme says must be watching her. “Internet Girl” catalogs the protagonist’s descent into the digital, from Neopets to naked chat rooms. Managing to reference 2 Girls 1 Cup and 9/11 in a single sentence, the narrator continues apace, jumping from cultural touchstone to cultural touchstone without stopping for breath. The collection does take the occasional detour across a more traditional narrative arc, as in “Cancel Me,” in which the main character is locked out of a party. Standing in the rain with two dimwitted stand-ins for male mediocrity, she contemplates cancel culture, absolution, and, not for the last time, edgelords. The first-person narrators of these stories, only one of whom is named, share a hodgepodge of leftist beliefs not quite coherent enough to serve as evidence in the debate over whether they are in fact the same person. This book is billed as fiction, a truth that may recurrently shock the reader. The fictionality here is another layer to be parsed, along with thick films of irony and sincerity that demand to be scrubbed through by hand. If you text with a single index finger, steer clear. The girls who inhabit this world are only occasionally wise, but always clever.
Oddly exquisite.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593656532
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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