AYITI

Name: AYITI
Author: Roxane Gay
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2826-3

by Roxane Gay ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2018

Gay has addressed these subjects with more complexity since, but this debut amply contains the righteous energy that drives...

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A set of brief, tart stories mostly set amid the Haitian-American community and circling around themes of violation, abuse, and heartbreak.

This debut collection was first published by a small press in 2011, before Gay became a household name as a fiction writer, essayist, and memoirist (Hunger, 2017, etc.). Republished with two new stories in 2018, much of it reads like a rehearsal for her more ambitious work, though it’s worth exploring in itself for Gay’s sharp-elbowed flash fiction. One of the new stories, “Sweet on the Tongue,” echoes the plot of her debut novel, An Untamed State: A woman visiting her native Haiti is abducted and raped, beyond the help of her wealthy husband, and the shorter version emphasizes how difficult it is to articulate an assault in its immediate aftermath. The tension is equally dramatic in the closing “A Cool, Dry Place,” in which a Haitian couple plans to make a dangerous boat trek to Miami, struggling to decode both the mythology of America and their own difficult relationship. Usually, though, the stories are brief and intimate: There's a lesbian relationship in “Of Ghosts and Shadows” (“We are the women people ignore because two women loving each other is an American thing”); American tourists sexually fetishize Haitian women in “The Harder They Come”; and a new arrival to America is taunted in the schoolyard in the opening “Motherfuckers.” This book set the tone that still characterizes much of Gay’s writing: clean, unaffected, allowing the (often furious) emotions to rise naturally out of calm, declarative sentences. That gives her briefest stories a punch even when they come in at two pages or fewer, sketching out the challenges of assimilation in terms of accents, meals, or “What You Need to Know About a Haitian Woman.”

Gay has addressed these subjects with more complexity since, but this debut amply contains the righteous energy that drives all her work.

Pub Date: June 19, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2826-3

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PORTABLE FEMINIST READER
edited by Roxane Gay

- BOOK REVIEW
OPINIONS
by Roxane Gay

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SELECTED WORKS OF AUDRE LORDE
by Audre Lorde ; edited by Roxane Gay

- AWARDS
Roxane Gay To Receive Literary Service Award

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EAST OF EDEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 1952

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

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Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.

Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952

ISBN: 0142004235

Page Count: 616

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK IN VIETNAM
by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICA AND AMERICANS
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson

- BOOK TO SCREEN
‘East of Eden’ Series in the Works at Netflix

- BOOK TO SCREEN
4 New Adaptations To Watch in October

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.