Welcome Home – 4/5 Stars If you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Lucia Berlin’s collected/selected stories “A Manual for Cleaning Ladies” that came out in 2015. This collection of stories is so good and does a thing that I am always amazed by, transcends the recommendations of readers I don’t trust. It was a hot thing for a little while and this is often a dangerous proposition for readers because I don’t really believe a lot of certain […]
Bark bark bark bark bark
Lorrie Moore is an elder stateswoman of contemporary literature. Her two story collections Self-Help and Birds of America are two of my favorite story collections ever. She is in the age of Vintage Contemporaries with the zany covers where everybody had a recent MFA and it was the 80s and we were reading about divorce and affairs. And Huzzah! This is not the same thing. In fact, this is a pretty weak collection all around. I couldn’t find a single story I could get behind in this […]
Forgiveness Lives Alone and Far Off Down the Road
Don’t read Lorrie Moore. Everybody should read Lorrie Moore immediately. Lorrie Moore is not recommended, lest you dissolve into a pile of tears and whiskey because she says everything you feel and think deep down and not so deep down. Lorrie Moore is essential, because she says everything you feel and think deep down and not so deep down. I had already been a Lorrie Moore fan. Her writing is beautiful, her female characters complex and flawed and real. Her jokes are sharp, her heartbreaks palpable. […]
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Benoîte-Marie (Berie) is our narrator. We start with her in Paris, where she’s traveling with her husband, who is lecturing on Tay-Sachs disease. Berie is vaguely dissatisfied, filled with ennui about her marriage. She muses about her teenage-hood in Horsehearts, upstate NY, and her deep friendship with Silsby Chaussée. It’s a story told in wonderfully crafted, evocative prose, that captures not so much a story arc, but rather the feeling of being almost grown up, wandering, being consumed by a friendship, finding an identity while losing your innocence, feeling lost […]