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ANOTHER PLACE YOU'VE NEVER BEEN

Name: ANOTHER PLACE YOU'VE NEVER BEEN
Author: Rebecca Kauffman
ISBN: 978-1-59376-656-6

by Rebecca Kauffman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2016

In this debut novel, characters affected by "the cruelty of carelessness" nonetheless make the best of what they get.

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Debut author Kauffman examines the lives of working-class characters connected to Buffalo, New York, in a novel of loosely linked stories.

A father attempts to be a good parent when his daughter visits for the summer but gets an ultimatum from his girlfriend: either the kid goes or she does. He chooses the girlfriend, and the ramifications of this decision echo through the book in subtle ways. The novel is composed of short, storylike chapters, many told from the points of view of minor characters. We see the girl, Tracy, first through the eyes of her father's resentful girlfriend and later the girlfriend of a cousin. But gradually the connections deepen. As we follow Tracy from childhood to adulthood, she searches for love and purpose. Kauffman's compassion for her lonely characters is evident. At an ill-fated holiday gathering, Tracy watches her cousin Shelly "looking, as usual, like she was a woman who really knew how the world worked." Another divorced father, unsure of his ability to parent, feels "a private, throbbing panic" when his son throws his arms around him at the Shamu show at Sea World. Later he finds himself comforted by a chirping cricket and a loaf of banana bread as he tries to "become a man who finally deserved the things he once had." A character takes his ancient, sedated cat, Monkey, for a ride on a Ferris wheel. As he explains at the vet's, he asked for a monkey when he was 10, but "I got what I got." "We all get what we get, don't we?" the woman said. "No matter what we ask for." One misstep is the mysterious Native Americans who appear periodically, laconic and stoic, to deliver some of the novel's best lines. Tracy's father reveals he's dying of cancer to a stranger who tells him that death could be "just another place you've never been."

In this debut novel, characters affected by "the cruelty of carelessness" nonetheless make the best of what they get.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-59376-656-6

Page Count: 204

Publisher: Soft Skull Press

Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
I'LL COME TO YOU
by Rebecca Kauffman

- BOOK REVIEW
CHORUS
by Rebecca Kauffman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HOUSE ON FRIPP ISLAND
by Rebecca Kauffman

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BUNNY

by Mona Awad ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2019

Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for...

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A viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs, Awad’s latest may be the first (and only?) entry into the canon of MFA horror.

Samantha Heather Mackey is the single outsider among her fiction cohort at Warren University, which is populated by Bunnies. “We call them Bunnies,” she explains, “because that is what they call each other.” The Bunnies are uniform in their Bunniness: rich and hyperfeminine and aggressively childlike, fawning over each other (“Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?”), wearing kitten-printed dresses, frequenting a cafe where all the food is miniature, from the mini cupcakes to the mini sweet potato fries. Samantha is, by definition, not a Bunny. But then a note appears in her student mailbox, sinister and saccharine at once: an invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon, one of their many Bunny customs from which Samantha has always been excluded, like “Touching Tuesdays” or “making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.” And even though she despises the Bunnies and their cooing and their cloying girlishness and incomprehensible stories, she cannot resist the possibility of finally, maybe being invited into their sweet and terrifying club. Smut Salon, though, is tame compared to what the Bunnies call their “Workshop,” which, they explain, is an “experimental” and “intertextual” project that “subverts the whole concept of genre,” and also “the patriarchy of language,” and also several other combinations of creative writing buzzwords. (“This is about the Body,” a Bunny tells Samantha, upon deeming her ready to participate. “The Body performing in all its nuanced viscerality.”) As Samantha falls deeper into their twee and terrifying world—drifting from her only non-Bunny friend in the process—Awad (13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, 2016) gleefully pumps up the novel’s nightmarish quality until the boundary between perception and reality has all but dissolved completely. It’s clear that Awad is having fun here—the proof is in the gore—and her delight is contagious.

Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for everyone.

Pub Date: June 11, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-525-55973-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ROUGE
by Mona Awad

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL'S WELL
by Mona Awad

- BOOK REVIEW
13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL
by Mona Awad

- PROFILES
Mona Awad

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THE BLUEST EYE

by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 1970

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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.