RaveLongreadsI discovered — about five stories in to DeWitt’s bursting, bizarre new story collection, Some Trick (New Directions) that the most pleasurable way to be with her fiction calls for a verb that requires no gear. What you really ought to do with DeWitt’s prose is dance with it ... In DeWitt’s case, it is best to simply follow this dizzy mind where it leads, and be delighted. Prepare to sweat on the journey, though ... DeWitt is an inventive stylist, a ruthlessly curious intellectual, and a sparkling wit; her stories, accordingly, tend to deal in language, philosophy, and humor before touching plot and character ... characters introduced two or three pages in suddenly take over a piece, jerking us into their lives and demanding focus. Familiar verbs are repurposed to make new meanings ... The humor in these pages gave me the same kind of hard little laughs that I knew when first encountering Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita ... The stories that really penetrate in this book, in addition to dancing us clean, marry linguistic fireworks with all the emotional meat that is behind DeWitt’s aesthetic mission
