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HOW TO WRESTLE A GIRL

STORIES

Boldly styled and deeply original.

Short stories—many linked—about the fraught and fiery rituals of girl- and womanhood.

Blackburn’s second collection—following Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (2017)—is divided into two parts. In the first, stories that largely clock in at a handful of pages give us lightning-quick glimpses of familial and romantic relationships. The opening story investigates the link between growing up female and social media attention (“Fam”). A struggling couple visit a dog trainer thinking that the key to their problems lies in improving their dogs’ behavior (“Thirteen Porcelain Schnauzers”). A biology teacher and her female student have their relationship scrutinized (“Biology Class”). In the book’s second part, a clear narrative emerges over the course of the stories, as a series of disasters, minor and major, befalls a high school protagonist in Southern California. Her father dies unexpectedly of sleep apnea (“Fat”); her elbow is crushed by an errant softball pitch (“Grief Log”). Her mother goes off the rails, having an affair with a local pastor (“Black Communion”) and subsequently attempting suicide (“Ambien and Brown Liquor”). The protagonist must deal with her broken family, her domineering older sister, and her burgeoning romantic feelings for her best friend, Esperanza. Ultimately, these are stories about the chaos of bodies, from menstruation to athletics, from sex to movie makeup. Rather than tell an overarching narrative, each story acts as a fragment of a wildly patterned mosaic, and through accumulation, patterns come clear, if not exactly a single picture. This structural inventiveness mirrors the formally inventive stories. There are tales structured as crossword puzzles (“In the Counselor’s Waiting Room With No Wi-Fi”), as quizzes (“Quiz”), and as instructions, as in the title story. With brash humor and inventive energy, Blackburn sets her stories “on the edge of disorder” and sustains that tension throughout.

Boldly styled and deeply original.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-374-60279-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021

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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.

Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

Pub Date: July 30, 2024

ISBN: 9781250899576

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024

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THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

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A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.

Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

Pub Date: April 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

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