Crucial stories that pierce the heart of the modern world. A must-read.
Thirteen short stories by one of the Mexican progenitors of magical realism, translated for the first time into English.
In Garro’s fleeting, powerful visions, the only thing that’s certain is uncertainty, though never the uncertainty of the author, the characters, or the readers. Rather, Garro explores the uncertainty of time itself. In “It’s the Tlaxcalteca’s Fault,” a young wife in a wealthy household flits through the centuries, imprisoned by the comfort of her life in modern-day Mexico City, free when she suffers the horror of the fall of Tenochtitlán to the invading conquistadors in the 1500s. In the title story, two sisters spy on the mysterious Don Flor, who keeps the colorful days of the week imprisoned in his round white house, torturing them into submission so that he may “fit [them] with the virtue that would check [their] vice.” In “The Day We Were Dogs,” the same two children will themselves into becoming dogs named Christ and Buddha and—together with Toni, a real family pet—wander through an animal’s nonsynchronous experience of time, where they witness a gruesome murder. The theme of parallel time frames and characters who experience multiple simultaneous realities is employed in the majority of the stories, as are repeated characters—the two sisters, Eva and Leli; their witchy housekeeper, Candelaria; the beleaguered servant, Rutilio—who resemble each other from story to story but do not perfectly replicate the lives they lived before. The result is prose that swims with a heady sense of transformation, of sorrow, of the inescapable violence of the past, of the predictable violence of the future, all threaded together by Garro’s fine stylistic sensibility and startling descriptive voice. Originally published in 1964, this collection stands as a seminal work prefiguring the surrealist and magical realist movements that would come to define so much of Latin American literature in the decades to come. However, a contemporary reader coming fresh to Garro’s work will find a voice that feels as vital today as it ever did.
Crucial stories that pierce the heart of the modern world. A must-read.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781949641899
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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