...[a] richly layered collection ... Alcott evokes the confusing intensity of teenage friendship, a closeness bordering on the erotic ... Alcott’s prose, both sensuous and cerebral, abounds with insight into people and the shapes life contorts them into.
Kathleen Alcott is the author of three novels distinguished by beautiful if sometimes gauzy prose. But her new story collection Emergency signals a remarkable stylistic sea change ... Gone are all traces of prettiness, replaced by sentences of startling aphoristic strength ... Impressive.
Permeated by a sense of disaster ... [A] striking title story ... Alcott’s sentences are tightly constructed and indelible ... As the best fiction does, Emergency refuses to offer simple diagnoses for today’s social and personal conditions ... This is a book you must wade into, slowly immersing yourself in its murky and unsettling world.
The world falls away as Kathleen Alcott’s stories unfold in her sublime collection, Emergency. The smallest moment, the briefest description, the single telling detail are given the attention a stonecutter would give a gem. Alcott’s gift is breathtaking ... The stories take their time but never feel slow and are mesmerizing, in part, because there is very little dialogue to break the spell of the narrative. Alcott’s voice is so sure ... The title story is a knockout ... Reading Emergency took me out of myself in much the same way writing does; the story, the page, was all that existed. These stories are lovely and tart and marvelously peculiar, the product of an interesting and interested mind.
Alcott’s sentences, too, strain to hold as much evidence as they can, and often succeed. This maximalist approach to storytelling relies on astounding powers of memory and invention. In Alcott’s work the record will not be sweetened or sanded down. Instead it is reconstituted and reimagined until the urgency of the past comes into full view ... With their first collection of short stories, Emergency, Alcott has arrived somewhere new ... Alcott doesn’t hold back either when drawing the reader into the protagonists’ psychic torments, their splashiest ambiguities. With precision and grace Alcott animates the tension between the characters’ need to let the past make extravagant claims on them and their need to protect themselves from the danger those claims pose.
Alcott’s debut collection of short fiction subtly probes despair in all its guises and confronts the numerous skills needed to survive uncertain times ... Deftly blending acerbic observations with tender admiration for the ways her protagonists must tackle contemporary challenges, Alcott brings an intense and unflinching presence to the worlds she creates.
Alcott’s prose is cerebral and knotty, but patience yields exquisite insights about women’s agency and the corrosiveness of male privilege. Stories that are worth reading twice.
