We have a copy of Pesticide by Kim Hays
to give away!
To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right-hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter. Winner will be chosen by the end of April from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!
Ly Tran’s House of Sticks beautifully captures what it means to be an immigrant in America: the struggle to adapt to your new world’s norms, the desperate desire to succeed there, and the love and heartache that your old life still haunts you with. The juxtaposition of holding onto her old identity while embracing her American one with her belief that escaping everything that is connected to Vietnam is the only way to succeed in the U.S. draws the reader in with the perpetual tension in her mind and heart, which Tran eventually evolves into the understanding that “[her father] was trying to save [their] lives” rather than ruin them.
This short story collection by doctor/ writer Fiona Robertson, lures us into intimate scenarios where joy and its adversary– fear– are coterminous. From a lovelorn housewife caught in a literal storm and a lonely man in a housing estate, Robertson’s characters drip in pathos and multidimensionality within the tight confines of each story, leaving readers saying a reticent farewell, wondering after the characters, ambivalent about their predicaments.
This meticulous nature of her research into each story marks her out from other writers. This is again evident in another beautiful story where a Parsi youth is obsessed with creating his own brand of perfume (Parfum). Rochelle goes into a heady mixture of the scents and perfumes employed. She even has a lab where the protagonist works to manufacture that one perfume that can be his own. Finally, instead of his wife, he finds solace in the arms of a maid whose function is merely to be like a springboard of scents.
Something So Precious is a novella that explores at once the thrill of youth, suffocation of legacy, the secrets families keep and the elusive nature of desire. Some of the prose would not seem out of place in a novel by Anaïs Nin, as it delves deftly into the intricacies of love affairs with both realism, poetic lyricism and philosophical musing. I mention Nin in particular because she was a visionary in femme erotica and Lee’s prose, for a male writer, not unlike Pedro Almodóvar’s films, touched me for its understanding of femme desire.
Here there is heartache and trauma and humanity. There is detachment and longing and grief. Maybe we need to expand the umbrella that covers a “better class” of people. Or maybe, our narrator is accurate when, early in the book, he asserts, “Everyone I know is horrible.”
Cold Enough for Snow is a deeply beautiful novel, richly potent in its themes, while resisting simple explication. It reads quickly, driven forward by the tension between presence and absence, love and shame, caring and being cared for, past and present, belonging and otherness, while its meaning unfolds slowly, lingering.
In Shaky Town, Mathews expertly shows us how things work and why they break down, taking apart and putting back together a range of small, yet fully felt lives. His overlapping worlds are mapped in prose that shimmers like hammered copper. He knows this territory well: you don’t doubt that when a certain bug shrinks the leaves of a eugenia hedge, more of a morose neighbor’s sad guitar music will bleed through.
We have a copy of The American Dream of Braven Young by Brooke Raybould to give away!
To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right-hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter. Winner will be chosen by the end of January from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!
One of the coolest things about the thirteen stories that make up this collection and makes them legitimate contenders for the title is the sense of revelation that each embodies, whether it’s a poignant insight into love or suicide or your “otherness,” or even just the quotidian awareness of being hungry after watching a lion bite off your mob boss’s head, as in S.A. Cosby’s hilarious noir, “Pantera Rex.” Each of these stories has its moment, some more subtle than others, some more dire. (Look no further than the first story, Lori D. Johnson’s “Shepherd’s Hell,” if you’re looking for “dire.”)