Depressing, banal, forgettable fiction.
This omnibus collection of 20 stories is packaged with a CD containing 20 love songs also written by Burgin.
That is this unnecessary volume’s only distinction. For Burgin, who teaches at Saint Louis University and has published three earlier collections (Fear of Blue Skies, 1997, etc.), is a monotonous writer who strikes the same chords repeatedly. Most of his characters are inchoate loners and losers, driven by the need for romantic or sexual connection, obsessed with defining, and thereby understanding, themselves. And they all sound the same: the timid ad man who finds initial stimulation, then confirmation of his darkest fears, among a group of men who emulate admired celebrities (“The Identity Club”); the vacationing banker who indulges fantasies of power and control in a brief borderline-homoerotic encounter with a clueless young stud (“Bodysurfing”); a would-be Lothario who picks up a beautiful girl in a bookstore but fails to ensnare her by concocting a story about his nonexistent marriage and his losses (“The Liar”); and the famous conductor who artfully seduces an admiring young journalist (“Song of the Earth,” which was later developed into Burgin’s 1999 novel, Ghost Quartet). There’s hardly a graceful image or an engaging turn of phrase here. And too many of its stories begin with hopeful meetings of strangers who’ve come together anticipating sex or love but end up either perpetrating or suffering verbal or physical abuse (“Vacation,” “The Horror Conference,” “With All My Heart,” “Carbo’s,” “The Urn,” etc). Only two stories rise above the general level of mediocrity: an unhappy husband’s fantasizing of hiring an unlikely new acquaintance to murder his wife (“Ghost Parks”); and a gradually exfoliating realization, in “The Victims,” that the seemingly brilliant friend whom its narrator admires and envies is, in fact, “a thirty-five-year-old man who’s never accomplished anything in his life.”
Depressing, banal, forgettable fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-86538-115-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Ontario Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations,...
These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014).
The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi’s architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend’s two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton’s friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton’s co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche’s fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?," Dayang stars as ingénue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women’s societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood,” and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant.
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi’s stories are often cheerfully sentimental.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-463-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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