Outrageously original and deeply felt stories with an indelible effect.
Startling, otherworldly encounters reveal universal emotions in six fierce short stories.
Schweblin, who writes both novels and short stories, proves once again here how urgent and efficient fiction can be. The six tart slices that make up this bitter dark-chocolate orange are a provocative answer to the Beatles’ question: “All the lonely people / Where do they all belong?” The book’s lonely people include a woman who tries to drown herself; estranged friends on the phone reliving an accident; a 2-year-old boy who has lost the ability to speak; a writer at a residency in Shanghai; the grown daughter of a dementia patient; and two young sisters determined to rehabilitate a shattered poet. These are forces of nature with powerful intellects, internationally situated (Schweblin is from Buenos Aires and lives in Berlin), conversant in upheaval and despair, who make startling leaps of time and circumstances. In these stories, each person hungry to connect has a counterpart who can’t or won’t respond. Attempts at closing the gap create guilt, foreboding, or a sharper awareness: We love others but are ultimately alone. And yet each story sings with meaning the reader gleans from witnessing. As one of the young sisters notes of a mysterious house: “You had to stand there for a moment, very still, and get used to that even darker darkness, before you could finally see anything.” These stories, too, require an adjustment of the eyes, so that just after we are shocked by an eerie threat (a ghostly cat, a telepathic neighbor, a violent guest), we realize we have been party to a central human truth. Some revelations come in the form of body horror, and the gore can be hilariously goofy—a welcome lightness to the more somber scenes of tender caretaking (or unapologetic cruelty). Schweblin and veteran translator McDowell trace the slim barrier between perception and reality with masterful narration, piercing dialogue, stealthy wit, and psychological precision.
Outrageously original and deeply felt stories with an indelible effect.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803103
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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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