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Father Guards the Sheep
In Sari Rosenblatt’s collection, by turns tender and hilarious, we see fathers who are bullies and nervous watchdogs, haunted by their own pasts and fear of the future they may never see. And who do their daughters become? A substitute teacher who encounters mouthy students who believe she’s not real. Another lands a job on her city’s arson squad, researching derelict properties their owners might want to burn. A beleaguered mother, humiliated by the PTA’s queen bee, finds solace in an ancient piece of caramel candy. “I keep sucking,” she says, “until some flavor, no longer caramel, comes out.” In the end, this is what all these finely wrought characters want: to wring sweetness from what’s been passed down to them. Rosenblatt’s comic sensibility, so present in these stories, entertains and consoles, while seeming to say to her readers: you might as well laugh.
Stories No One Hopes Are about Them
At once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are about Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Big things happen in this collection. But it's also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar.
No Use Pretending
The characters in these stories have been forced into conditions of life that they find unbearable, and the stories chart their often tragically misguided attempts to relieve their suffering via connections with other people or through the pursuit of addictive attachments (to opiates in one story, to sleep in another). This collection encompasses diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism to a Kafkaesque fairy tale, from fabulist “weird fiction” to an episode from The Odyssey that becomes a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals. These stories invite the reader to reconsider moral and ideological certainties, to take a fresh look at such issues as fracking and drone warfare. In one story, a petroleum engineer discovers that one of his wastewater wells may be causing earthquakes, and in another the pilot of an Air Force drone seeks to reconcile his conflicting roles as protector and executioner, husband and soldier. The scientist and the serviceman are both presented with problems that have no easy or obvious solutions, situations that force them to confront the messy, compromising complexity of being human.
The Man in the Banana Trees
"The stories in Marguerite Sheffer's debut collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, take place in the past, present, and future-from the American Gulf South to orbit around Jupiter. We meet teachers and students, ghosts and aliens. An ice cream consultant in the year 2036 predicts a devastating flavor trend and a disgruntled New England waiter investigates a mysterious tanker crash. Although wildly varied in setting, length, and genre, a thread of the fantastic unites these stories, as characters struggle to understand that thing lurking at the edge of their perception: something sinister, or maybe-miraculous. Sheffer dips into science fiction and fantasy to defamiliarize everyday horrors and confront them with heart and sly humor. Her stories explore complicity, whiteness, the lack of bodily autonomy women face, and what we are willing to destroy-or not-to dream a better world for our children"--
Everything Flirts
At the heart of the stories in Everything Flirts are some of life's trickiest questions: Why is it so hard to make the first move on a date? How do we find the person we will love? If you finally find a person to love, how do you convince them to love you back? With a mixture of humor and reverence, Sharon Wahl hijacks classic works of philosophy and turns their focus to love. The sublime and the ridiculous come together to playfully examine why love just might be a topic too hard for philosophers to explain.
A Young Wife
In this sweeping saga of love, betrayal, and redemption, a young Dutch woman's search for family takes her across three continents.
The Iowa Review
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You Never Get It Back
The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams’s precise and observant collection offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of Kate, a young woman from rural New England, moving between her childhood in the countryside of Vermont and her twenties and thirties in the northeast, southwest, and South in pursuit of a vocation, first as a research scientist and later as a writer. Place is a palpable presence: Boston in winter, Maine in summer, Virginia’s lush hillsides, the open New Mexico sky. Along the way, we meet Kate’s difficult bohemian mother and younger sister, her privileged college roommate, and the various men Kate dates as she struggles to define what she wants from the world on her own terms. Wryly funny and shot through with surprising flashes of anger, these smart, dreamy, searching stories show us a young woman grappling with social class, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having.
I'll Take You There
Behind every good man is a great woman - or three The kaleidoscopic new novel from Wally Lamb: the number one New York Times bestselling author of She's Come Undone. Every Monday evening, Felix Funicello sets up a new film at an old vaudeville theatre for his weekly movie club. But one night, as this sixty-year-old scholar prepares the projectionist booth, he is confronted by an unanticipated guest: the ghost of Lois Weber. Once a trailblazing motion picture director from Hollywood's silent film era, Lois invites Felix to sit back and watch a new feature on the big screen - scenes from Felix's life. Though unnerved by these ethereal apparitions, Felix comes to look forward to his encounters with Lois. And as these magical movies play before him, he begins to reflect on the trio of unforgettable women who have profoundly impacted his life: his troublesome yet loving sister; his Generation Y daughter; and Verna, a fiery would-be beauty queen from the 1950s. An evocative and kaleidoscopic convergence of Hollywood, feminism and family secrets, I'll Take You There is a radiant homage to a single life and to the resiliency, strength and power of women.
Ancestry
How does one live a good life? If you’re Pat Graves, you change your name to Cecile Collette, move to Cleveland, and join three churches and the Rotary Club. For Cecile, who will reinvent herself again before the story ends, it may be possible to make Michigan and everything else she touches beautiful, but she’ll come to grief when she tries to redesign another human being. In the title story, Mackenzie, a girl without looks or potential, builds a full life in Paris, based on the sketchy belief that she had an ancestor renowned for being dauntless. College freshman Adam, holding a fantasy of his newly discovered father, finds the man broke and foolish; still he does all he can to rescue his dad from a disastrous contract. Kate, convinced she’s doing the right thing, helps her cousin gain full custody of his daughter, only realizing years later the truth of what happened. Watching CNN, a grandmother recalls a date she once had with a man now giving advice on foreign policy. Whether set in Scandinavia, America, France, England, Australia, or Nepal, these stories champion those who are tenacious in the face of life’s surprises.
