Highly original stories that speak to the challenges of being human in the 21st century.
A collection of stories that artfully reframe issues including parenting, aging, illness, and life during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“He hypnotized me, and I loved him”: That’s the beginning of “The Hypnotist,” a story about the narrator’s lifelong connection with her father. “The hypnosis depended on a sort of innocence, a bargain between parent and child.” As if turning a shirt inside-out and finding a beautiful new pattern, Bender—a National Book Award finalist for her story collection Refund (2015)—does a brilliant job of discovering novel metaphors and creating futuristic plots to re-examine some of life’s most taken-for-granted relationships and situations. In “The Listener,” one of the collection’s standouts, a therapist named Saul suffers from a mysterious illness (perhaps chronic fatigue syndrome) that saps all his energy. Bender finds the perfect way to show how Saul’s invisible illness feels by having him kidnapped at gunpoint by a man pretending to be a new patient. At the bank, where his captor has taken him to withdraw money, now posing as his son, no one can see what’s happening: “What did it take for someone to see another?” he wonders, a question that cuts right to the heart of how well anyone can truly know other people. Other stories are incisive allegories for our age. In “The Shame Exchange,” which won a Pushcart Prize, elected officials who have no shame take on the shame of ordinary people selected by a lottery, with the idea that they might begin to “govern with sensitivity and in a kindly way,” while in “The Court of the Invisible,” people begin disappearing because of the cruelty of everyday life. Not a lot happens in many of these stories; sometimes that feels like the point, as in “Data” and “Arlene Is Dead,” two tales that capture the disorienting claustrophobia of the pandemic, though other pieces might have been trimmed without losing anything.
Highly original stories that speak to the challenges of being human in the 21st century.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781640095700
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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