A pleasure for fans of short fiction and a promise of good things to come from this year’s roster of prizewinners.
Sophomore volume in a recently inaugurated PEN series honoring debut short fiction published in print or online.
As selected by three judges, including 2017 Kirkus Prize winner Lesley Nneka Arimah, these dozen stories tend to the dark side, with rare moments of humor in a moody fictive landscape; they’re thus just right for their time. In the opening story, “Six Months,” Celeste Mohammed brilliantly captures the confusions faced and moral shortcuts taken by a Caribbean immigrant to New York, who lives in a ratty basement but at least is in America: “That’s the only damn thing that matter.” Faced with an embarrassment of riches of a kind, Luther has to keep an elaborate set of lies straight in his head, but he’s up to the challenge: “Don’t be lucky and coward, Luther. Go brave.” He’s not a bad man, but he’s not very good, either. The same is true of Shutian, a Taiwanese man whose decadeslong life with his wife, Mayling, is lived out in just a few pages in Lin King’s aptly titled story “Appetite”; his great sin is to be inert and boring, moving Mayling to escape, in part by way of guitar lessons with a man destined to become well-known, then forgotten again, as the decades pass. The story is a masterpiece of compression, squeezing whole decades into paragraphs. One comparatively light piece centers on a theme-park Hercules who is confronted by a tot who blurts out the fact that his father dresses up in his mother's clothes when she's not home: “And in this moment,” Hercules thinks, “the only thing running through my mind is, I’ll be damned, that binder doesn’t cover everything after all.” A particularly successful story is a kind of sci-fi/horror pastiche called, fittingly, “Zombie Horror,” and though its editor is quick to claim it as literary fiction, it benefits from a little genre goofiness.
A pleasure for fans of short fiction and a promise of good things to come from this year’s roster of prizewinners.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936787-93-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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