1. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
31 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Denis Johnson, in all his work, aimed to locate the hidden, actual face of things. But the new stories build without those miraculous balls of hail, and their truths are necessarily deeper, and more precise, true as you would true a wheel … It feels like the paced vision of a writer who has been made to understand that life is fairly rude and somewhat short, but that the world contains an uneven distribution of grace, and that wisdom lies in recognizing where it—such grace—has presented itself. The stories are about death and immortality, art and its reach, and they ask elemental questions about fiction, not as a literary genre but as a human tendency … These stories ask you to step into the room and listen closely. They are not showy anthems, and in many cases, they have dispensed with hindsight altogether.”
–Rachel Kushner (Bookforum)
*
2. You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld
13 Rave • 8 Positive
“You Think It, I’ll Say It gives sustained, compassionate attention to the middle-aged women of middle America … Her imagination is not fantastical; it is empathetic. She has a vision that ensures an inner life and a backstory that’s equally convincing for Laura Bush (whose life she borrowed for American Wife) or the parents in the carpool … That empathetic imagination is one of the defining features of Sittenfeld’s fiction, along with the unfashionable valuing of workaday family relationships over glamor or romance, and unpretentious, deprecating wit that’s never cruel—or at least never for long.”
–Annalisa Quinn (NPR)
*
3. Last Stories by William Trevor
16 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Fate dominates the marginalized characters—children, the elderly, single middle-aged men and women—who are struggling with what Trevor referred to in a 1989 Paris Review interview as life’s ‘meaninglessness.’ But his humanistic storytelling redeems each of these lives without judgment … Odd and unexpected relationships define many of the stories in the collection, often as love languishes somewhere in the narrative equation … Trevor’s half-century’s worth of masterful short fiction is justifiably admired … These exemplary Last Stories underscore that well-earned praise.”
–Robert Allen Papinchak (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
*
4. Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg
13 Rave • 4 Positive
“Deborah Eisenberg speaks in the voice of a despairing god: wry, cool, resonant, capable of three dimensions of irony at once, besotted with the beauty and tragedy of this darkening planet of ours … Every story in the new collection…holds at least one image that can knock you to your knees …Beauty that spreads through the mind and lingers there in alterations so deep they’re almost physical: This is what I love most about Eisenberg’s work … Eisenberg is a gorgeous writer of lines and dialogue and paragraphs, all the artistry in the marks upon the page, but even more deeply—and much more interestingly—she is an artist of the unsaid … Stare hard, Eisenberg tells us, and watch the banal world transform into marvels … I thank my stars that there’s a writer in the increasingly imperiled world as smart and funny and blazingly moral and devastatingly sidelong as she is.”
–Lauren Groff (The New York Times Book Review)
*
5. Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin
12 Rave • 5 Positive
“[In Evening in Paradise, there] is little if any diminishment in quality or intensity [of Berlin’s work] … One thing that makes Berlin so valuable is her gift for evoking the sweetness and earnestness of young women who fall in love … Berlin is so stealthily funny … Berlin probably deserved a Pulitzer Prize; she definitely deserved, to borrow the name of a Waylon Jennings song, a Wurlitzer Prize, for all the coins she drops into our mental jukeboxes. She has an instinctive access to the ways music can both provoke and fortify … During her lifetime she was not published by that major house, or any other. She is now.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
*
6. Some Trick by Helen DeWitt
11 Rave • 4 Positive
“The voice of these stories—compulsive, overstuffed, highfalutin and colloquial in equal measure, unafraid of exclamation points that would make Tom Wolfe blush—is like a record of the speed at which such a brain works, and the concomitant difficulty of slowing it down in order to deal with what we regular people would call ‘regular people.’ That voice’s resting pulse, so to speak, is a kind of deadpan logical progression … It shouldn’t work, really, none of it. It should seem too self-pitying, too inside baseball. Even armed with the knowledge of all that the author’s struggles have cost her, reading tales about geniuses suffering the indignity of exposure to nongeniuses might well cause a reader’s eyes to roll: I mean, tell it to James Joyce, you know? … What saves Some Trick in the end is not only that DeWitt is so very funny but that she has harnessed her coder’s brain to negative capability. Which is to say, while she is firmly on the side of the intellectual unicorns, she is also capable of doing full and hilarious justice to their bizarre, frustrating, alien, occasionally tiresome aspect. And she does treat the plight of these artists as a comedy rather than a tragedy, even if, as in any serious comedy, there are casualties.”
–Jonathan Dee (Harper’s)
*
7. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
11 Rave • 3 Positive
“These stories magnify what it means to be black in America—wherein your very presence can be deemed threatening, and therefore worthy of capital punishment—through a satirical, uncanny lens, reflecting back just how absurd and dehumanizing our reality is. They force us to reckon with our country’s toxic racism and consumerism while being compulsively readable and somehow even funny. Adjei-Brenyah pulls this off partly through his characters … Adjei-Brenyah’s sharp prose keeps [one short story] sinewy and darkly humorous while simultaneously allowing for flashes of tenderness … America might be dehumanizing, Adjei-Brenyah seems to say, but we can still be human.”
–Kristen Martin (BOMB)
*
8. A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley
11 Rave • 1 Mixed
“The characters who populate the nine stories in Jamel Brinkley’s singular collection feel simultaneously like budding children and grown men who have lived several lifetimes … They report on their worlds with an outsider quality so characteristic of the young—observant and aware but struggling to gain access to others—yet are capable of distilling the motivations of those around them with a deftness so swift it’s almost damning … his masterfully paced stories bring each character he constructs into the half-light, where they often remain seductively enigmatic … Through pages of peerless prose and startingly sharp sentences, what ultimately emerges is a constantly reframed argument about the role of power and masculinity, where vulnerability pulses beneath a skin of self-preservation.”
–Kristen Radtke (The Los Angeles Times)
*
9. How Are You Going to Save Yourself by JM Holmes
6 Rave • 4 Positive
“How Are You Going to Save Yourself asks questions about race and sex, about families and about what happens to us when communications break down. It’s a shockingly powerful debut collection from a writer whose talent seems almost limitless … Holmes addresses the difficulties inherent in all kinds of relationships … Holmes writes with a brutal honesty in every story, posing questions many would rather leave unasked … It’s hard to overstate what an incredible writer Holmes is. He has a real gift for phrasing … a debut book that reads like the work of a writer with decades of experience. It’s an unflinching look at themes that not too many authors are eager to tackle, and a book that asks important questions and challenges the reader to answer them honestly, as uncomfortable as those answers might be.”
–Michael Schaub (NPR)
*
10. White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar
3 Rave • 8 Positive
“Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s stories are brooding, precise, and painful indictments of patriarchal cultures … Colorism, homophobia, and racism toward and among women of color are frequent, acid themes. The details here are realistic and sharp: observations of ‘sausage-casing cleavage’; of books so fine that ‘a good wind would blow away the words’; of gilt frames and expensive fabrics and baubles that never satisfy. Of vicious poison that chokes the lungs, and of storied forests that once knew better times. Radical and searing, the stories of White Dancing Elephants demand and warrant an attentive, listening audience.”
–Michelle Anne Schingler (Foreword Reviews)
***
Our System: RAVE = 5 points, POSITIVE = 3 points, MIXED = 1 point, PAN = -5 points
