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HOW WE KNOW OUR TIME TRAVELERS

Compelling individual stories that falter slightly as a collection.

Fourteen loosely connected stories in which characters navigate their many possible futures.

In these darkly glimmering short fictions, largely set in the San Francisco Bay area, characters are generally lovelorn, directionless, and occupying marginalized roles in society, uniformly seeking to pin down identities and experiences that keep evading definition. In the title story, an aging artist who has fallen out of love with her own work is approached in her studio by a fan who reminds her so viscerally of a younger version of her husband that he just might be a figure of the past come forward in time. In “The Encroachment of Waking Life,” potentially metaphorical time travel becomes literal as the narrator, Vaidehi, hops on a plane to San Francisco hoping to reconnect with her lover, Rama, and finds that she’s accidentally gotten on a flight to the future. For Vaidehi, only six months have passed since they’ve seen each other, but Rama’s extra “twenty years of memories” have transformed him into either a stranger or, more disconcertingly, the man he always was beneath the gloss of love’s first bloom. The theme of love distorted and identities gone awry due to the impact of speculative technologies is explored in many of these tales. In the Bluebeard-influenced “Assembly Line,” Ashlin, a Tamil American jewelry maker, is plagued by a troubling sense of “darkness and clouds” that obscures her ability to remember herself any further back than “yesterday, and perhaps the day before that,” even as she becomes more deeply involved with a student in her enameling class who works in artificial intelligence and seems eerily familiar with the self she cannot recall. In “The Glitch,” the code controlling the holograms that represent the narrator’s family is compromised, introducing the illusion of free will to the illusionary reality which “the coder” has created to escape her very real grief. Filled with engaging characters navigating their increasingly strange worlds, the stories are by turns winsome and unsettling. As a group, though, they have a tendency to keep hitting the same thematic notes, blurring some of the reader’s appreciation of their individual forms.

Compelling individual stories that falter slightly as a collection.

Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024

ISBN: 9798987719770

Page Count: 216

Publisher: WTAW Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024

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THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

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A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.

Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

Pub Date: April 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.

Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

Pub Date: July 30, 2024

ISBN: 9781250899576

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024

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