Tag: Sarabande Books
-
Review: Erin Flanagan on Amy Gustine’s Story Collection You Should Pity Us Instead
Amy Gustine’s first collection of stories demonstrates a remarkable range, not only in situation and character, but also in the vast landscapes of human emotion and reaction. The characters surprise the reader with what they’re willing to do, but they also surprise themselves. In the opening story “All the Sons of Cain,” a mother goes…
-
Thrown, by Kerry Howley
“Does not every human story open midscene?” The majority of narratives offered to us about athletes are constructed with an absolute disregard for complexity or nuance and are, rather, woven neatly together in ways that simplify and obscure reality. Information is instead dispersed, largely, in the form of amazing yet incoherent SportsCenter clips or articles…
-
Praying Drunk, by Kyle Minor
In Praying Drunk, his second book following In the Devil’s Territory (Dzanc Books, 2008), Kyle Minor forays beyond the realm of literary realist fiction and into conceptual work even as he makes hay from the material that literary fiction has monopolized: suicide, cancer/terminal illness, lives changed irrevocably by events lasting only seconds, travel to the…
-
Coming of Age Glacially: A Review of Drowned Boy, by Jerry Gabriel
Jerry Gabriel quickly sets the scene in his first book of stories, linked by place and characters. In “Boys Industrial School,” the third sentence reads: “Beyond Nate and Donnie Holland there was just the desolate November woods and the endless hills and Milford Run meandering next to the road among the thickets.” The entire book…
Heavy Feather Review 