Michael Magras

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Poet’s House

Review by Michael Magras

Definitions differ, but many people eventually discover the value in approaching life’s challenges with at least a modicum of grace. Grace and its manifestations are at the heart of The Poet’s House, Jean Thompson’s charming novel about a young California woman with a learning disability who figures out her place in life with the help of an unexpected mentor: the acclaimed poet whose garden she tends.

Carla is in her early 20s and working for a landscaping company in Northern California. She didn’t finish college, in part because, as she puts it, “I have one of those brains that doesn’t process words on a page very well.” Her world consists mainly of her job, where she works for a guy who, in one of Thompson’s many beautiful pinpoint details, “was always convinced that his sweaty charms impressed the lady clients.” Carla also maintains relationships with her boyfriend, Aaron, who works in the IT department of a bank, and her mother, who wants Carla to consider a medical career.

Carla has never given any thought to poetry and assumes all poets “wore berets and drank too much.” But then she starts tending the garden of Viridian, a 70-something poet’s poet with only one published book to her name and a considerable air of mystery. Part of the mystery derives from her relationship years earlier with Mathias, “the most famous, brilliant poet of his era.” Many people believe that Mathias destroyed a new cycle of poems before his death by suicide at age 35, but Viridian has a copy of them. The only problem: She won’t tell anyone where the poems are, even though their publication would give her the financial windfall she desperately needs.

Part of the fun of The Poet’s House is in its small details and memorable descriptions, such as when Thompson writes that Viridian’s attire is “equal parts yoga practice and Star Wars costuming.” But the biggest pleasures are Carla’s evolution, the many well-drawn characters and subtle pokes at the competitiveness of the literary world. The novel occasionally takes too long to develop its themes on its way to a tidy conclusion, but this doesn’t distract from its ample joys, not least of which is Carla’s recognition that she is like the finest poems: complex and wondrous, with hidden mysteries and graces that aren’t immediately apparent.

The hero of Jean Thompson’s novel is like the finest poems: complex and wondrous, with hidden mysteries and graces that aren’t immediately apparent.
FictionShort Stories

You Have a Friend in 10A

Review by Michael Magras

Every writer has to start somewhere. Maggie Shipstead’s bestselling 2021 novel, Great Circle, earned a place on the Booker Prize shortlist, but the road to such success is often long. In Shipstead’s case, as she explains in the acknowledgments of You Have a Friend in 10A, her path began with stories written while studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University. 

This collection of 10 works of short fiction, all previously published, gives readers the inspiring experience of charting the maturation of one of America’s finest authors. Most impressive is the book’s range of perspectives, from the chilling “La Moretta,” in which a couple on their European honeymoon slowly realizes their marriage may have been a mistake, to “Souterrain,” a tale of a dying Parisian man and his housekeeper’s son, who believes the man to be his father.

In a few pieces, it’s clear that Shipstead was still discovering what her words could do, but the best are exceptional portraits of characters unaware of the effects of their actions. Highlights include “The Cowboy Tango,” in which a Montana man who runs a ranch for tourists becomes smitten with the teenage girl he hired as a wrangler and joins “in the silent chorus of the unloved” when she falls for his divorced nephew; and the story “Acknowledgments” (not to be confused with the author’s own acknowledgments), in which a pompous author uses hilariously Nabokovian sentences like “Let us skip that Rabelaisian era known as adolescence and hop jauntily to my twenty-fifth year.”

In one story, a character reflects that “even a life lived properly, lived better than she was living, could bring so much grief.” The finest stories in You Have a Friend in 10A show that perpetual grief may not necessarily lead to great lives, but it can produce scintillating fiction.

Maggie Shipstead's collection of 10 short stories, all previously published, gives readers the inspiring experience of charting the maturation of one of America's finest authors.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Kingdom of Sand

Review by Michael Magras

“There is no wealth but life,” wrote John Ruskin near the end of his 1860 book, Unto This Last. The unnamed narrator of Andrew Holleran’s doleful fourth novel, The Kingdom of Sand, cites Ruskin midway through, by which time readers know the reason this quotation is on his mind. A gay man in his 60s, the narrator is living alone in conservative North Florida, surrounded by dying neighbors and contemplating the harsh reality of impermanence. 

A nonlinear, episodic novel focused on the transient nature of life could have been depressing, but Holleran’s thoughtful, poetic treatment makes this material deeply moving and an important contribution to the literature of mortality. It’s one of the most beautiful novels of the year.

Each of the book’s five chapters touches on aging and the adjustments a person must make as they get older. Among the characters are the narrator’s 84-year-old father, who sees no reason to avoid having “four fried eggs and a rasher of bacon every morning” while his wife lies paralyzed in a nursing home after a fall.

Now that the narrator is closer to the end of his life than to the beginning, he has found many ways to take his mind off the inevitable, from visiting a Gainesville boat ramp where men congregate for sex to watching gay porn on his laptop. A more meaningful connection is his friendship with Earl, 20 years the narrator’s senior. After decades of teaching accounting in South Florida, Earl moved north to a house big enough to hold his books and opera records. He and the narrator share a platonic friendship that revolves around meeting at Earl’s house to watch old movies, and as the years pass, the narrator becomes Earl’s caregiver.

The novel gains considerable power from its recognition that no attempt at immortality, whether through art or other means, guarantees success. Classical radio stations change their format to all-talk, azaleas and camellias eventually droop, and every life, no matter how privileged, comes to an end.

The Kingdom of Sand is not for readers interested in lighthearted fare, but it’s a stunning meditation on what happens, as the narrator says, “when old age gets its claws in you.” Around the same time he cites Ruskin, the narrator reads a book on dying that offers sobering advice: Live a good life, because you’re not going to have much control over your ending. This exquisite novel offers similar counsel: The final destination may be grim, but with luck and a good set of directions, one can at least enjoy the ride.

A nonlinear novel focused on the transient nature of life could have been depressing, but Andrew Holleran's thoughtful, poetic treatment makes The Kingdom of Sand one of the most beautiful novels of the year.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Horse

Review by Michael Magras

Endurance isn’t always a desirable quality. When the goal is admirable—creating art that will survive for generations, or persevering to achieve a noble dream—fortitude is a strength worth demonstrating. But if the goal is deplorable, such as when reinforcing the continuance of racist behavior, the determination to triumph merits no such respect.

Many forms of endurance are at the center of Horse, Geraldine Brooks’ return to themes she explored so well in previous works, such as her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, March, which chronicles many of the injustices that occurred during America’s Civil War. Loosely based on a true story, Horse involves a discarded painting and a dusty skeleton, both of which concern a foal widely considered “the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.”

Brooks shifts her narrative among three related stories in as many centuries. In 2019, Theo, a Nigerian American graduate student at Georgetown University whose thesis is on 19th-century American equestrian art, makes a felicitous discovery, albeit from an unfriendly source. A racist widow who lives across the street from his apartment allows him to pick through the unwanted items she has put out on the sidewalk. His choice: an oil painting of a bright bay colt with four white feet.

Coincidentally enough—and indeed, some readers may find that the events in Horse rely too heavily on coincidence—a young white Australian woman named Jess, who runs the Smithsonian Museum’s vertebrate Osteology Prep Lab, discovers the articulated skeleton of the horse depicted in Theo’s painting. Theo and Jess eventually meet, although it’s a mortifying moment for her: Jess intimates that Theo is stealing her bike, when in fact he’s unlocking his identical model. Together they investigate the history of the horse.

That history is detailed in sections set in Kentucky and Louisiana in the 1850s and ’60s. Paramount among characters from the past are Jarret, an enslaved Black man who becomes the groom for the horse; Thomas J. Scott, a white Pennsylvania man who has come to Kentucky to paint animals; and Richard Ten Broeck, a wealthy white man whose interest in the horse is more mercenary than sportsmanlike.

The book’s third sections, set in 1950s New York, involve Martha Jackson, a real-life art dealer and equestrian lover who gains possession of the famous painting. Her sections add little, but Horse is brilliant when Brooks focuses on the 19th century and dramatizes American prejudice and discrimination before, during and after the Civil War. Jarret is a particularly memorable character, especially in his scenes with the horse and the painter, as is the slippery Ten Broeck, whose motivations are brilliantly set up and whose actions will resonate with chilling familiarity.

Brooks’ novel is an audacious work that reinforces, with sobering immediacy, the sad fact that racism has a remarkable capacity to endure.

Geraldine Brooks returns to themes she explored so well in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, March.
FictionComing of Age

Aue

Review by Michael Magras

In the Māori language, an auē is an anguished wail, a cry from the heart. Among the frustrations likeliest to cause such a lament are domestic violence and racism. New Zealand writer Becky Manawatu explores both of these painful forms of dominion in her impressive debut novel.

Manawatu gave herself a big challenge with Auē: Not only does her novel explore two fraught forms of subjection, but she also splits her narrative into three distinct perspectives. Two of them are Māori brothers, 17-year-old Taukiri and 8-year-old Ārama. Their father has died, and their mother has disappeared, so Taukiri drives Ārama to their Aunty Kat and Uncle Stu’s farm in Kaikōura, a coastal town on New Zealand’s South Island. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Taukiri assures his brother, yet he’s convinced Ārama will be better off without him.

As Manawatu skillfully shows, that’s not necessarily true. Ārama finds support from his Aunty Kat and neighbors Beth and Tom Aiken, but Uncle Stu is a brute, the type of ruffian to give his wife a black eye over his latest grievance, and who snatches a letter written by Taukiri and burns it before Ārama can read it.

Ārama is so distressed by his dislocation that he covers his body in bandages to calm himself. It would be of greater help for Taukiri to return, but in his brother’s absence, Ārama is comforted by memories they’ve shared and his ownership of a bone carving he and Taukiri fashioned from the carcass of a dead baby whale.

The book’s third storyline follows Jade and Toko, who, years earlier, meet at a beach party after Jade’s cousin Sav helps her to escape an abusive boyfriend. Jade, too, contends with domestic problems; her mother, Felicity, is loving but has “a craving for drugs.”

The tension in Auē sometimes flags, and some key details are withheld too long, but overall Manawatu does a nice job of gradually revealing secrets and the intricacies of the characters’ myriad tragedies. Auē exposes the racism some New Zealanders feel toward Māoris, but it’s ultimately a hopeful work with a message worth remembering: Cries from the heart can be painful, but sometimes they get answered.

Becky Manawatu's debut novel is ultimately a hopeful work with a message worth remembering: Cries from the heart can be painful, but sometimes they get answered.
FictionComing of Age

Young Mungo

Review by Michael Magras

The history of world literature is filled with second novels that pale in comparison to their author’s stellar freshman achievement. How many debuts have had the spectacular success of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain? More than 500,000 copies sold and the 2020 Booker Prize is not a bad way to start a literary career.

Readers will be happy to learn that Stuart’s follow-up, Young Mungo, is even stronger than his first book. This tale of two gay Glasgow teenagers caught amid various forms of prejudice in the early 1990s is a marvelous feat of storytelling, a mix of tender emotion and grisly violence that finds humanity in even the most fraught circumstances.

You know you’re in for a tough upbringing when your alcoholic mother names you after a patron saint known for having “started a fire from nothing, or . . . something,” as 15-year-old Mungo explains. But Mungo has bigger problems than his name, which Stuart describes in heartbreaking detail. Mungo’s alcoholic mother, 34-year-old Mo-Maw, often disappears on wild drinking sprees. When under the influence, she’s a harsher version of herself, transforming into a “heartless, shambling scarecrow” that Mungo, his brother Hamish and sister Jodie have nicknamed “Tattie-bogle.”

Hamish is a gang leader who leads fights against working-class Catholic youths, and he forces Mungo to join the Protestant cause and take to the streets with him. “I need to sort you out,” Hamish tells him. But Mungo doesn’t need sorting out. He needs more time with James Jamieson, a Catholic boy with whom he has fallen in love and who tends to birds in his beloved dovecote.

Scenes between Mungo and James are the most beautiful in the book. They stand in contrast to the moments that are among the most brutal: To toughen up Mungo, Mo-Maw sends him on a fishing trip with two thugs of questionable repute. That trip, like so much else in the book, doesn’t go the way Mungo, or his mother, ever anticipated.

Some plot elements in Young Mungo may disturb, but all are sensitively rendered, and the simplicity of Stuart’s writing makes them all the more powerful. One of the myths of St. Mungo is that he once brought a dead robin back to life. No such restoration occurs in young Mungo’s hardscrabble life, but as Stuart shows, hope often lies where you least expect it.

Douglas Stuart’s follow-up to Shuggie Bain is a marvelous feat of storytelling, a mix of tender emotion and grisly violence.
FictionPolitical Fiction

Glory

Review by Michael Magras

Sooner or later, every country experiences moments of upheaval. Some moments, however, are more consequential than others, such as the 2017 coup that ended the regime of Robert Mugabe as the president of Zimbabwe after four decades in power.

That ouster is the inspiration for Glory, NoViolet Bulawayo’s follow-up to her 2013 debut novel, We Need New Names, a finalist for the Booker Prize. Bulawayo has found a clever if familiar way to tell the story of a fictional African country and the fall of its leader: Clearly inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the population consists entirely of animals.

Known as the Father of the Nation, Old Horse is the leader of Jidada. He held a leadership role in the War of Liberation during the 1970s and has been in power for the past 40 years, his reign “longer than the nine life spans of a hundred cats.” In one of many witty touches, Bulawayo writes that Old Horse’s authority is so great that the sun twerks at his command and blazes with the intensity he desires.

Also in power, in her own way, is Old Horse’s wife, a donkey known as Dr. Sweet Mother, who denounces the “depravity” of the Sisters of the Disappeared, a group that demands the return of regime dissenters who have mysteriously vanished.

The novel’s action takes off from there, with a pack of dogs known as Defenders determined to protect the current regime; a vice president, also a horse, who schemes to take over; an Opposition convinced that the overthrow of the government will lead to better days; and a goat named Destiny, long exiled from Jidada, who returns after a decade’s absence to reunite with her mother and tell the story of her country’s struggles.

Glory is an allegory for the modern age, with references to contemporary world politics, chapters written as a series of tweets, and animals checking social media for updates on fast-changing developments. Animal Farm is the obvious parallel, but some readers will also note the influence of works by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, especially in Bulawayo’s extravagant storytelling and critique of colonialism.

Late in the novel, Destiny notes “the willingness of citizens to get used to that which should have otherwise been the source of outrage.” As this wise, albeit occasionally repetitive, book makes clear, that’s a cautionary message all countries should heed.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s Animal Farm-inspired novel is an allegory for the modern age, with animals checking social media for updates on fast-changing developments.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Hummingbird

Review by Michael Magras

When one looks back upon a life, one remembers it as a series of noncontiguous fragments, with each discrete moment forming a picture of a person. Italian writer Sandro Veronesi knows this instinctively. In The Hummingbird, he presents just such a puzzle to create a unique portrait of an enigma of a man.

In a narrative that moves through seven decades, from 1959 to 2030, Veronesi chronicles the life of Marco Carrera, an ophthalmologist in the Italian village of Bolgheri. His mother nicknamed him “the hummingbird” because, until age 14, he was worryingly shorter than his peers. But Marco resembles a hummingbird not just in his childhood stature but also, as one character puts it, “because all [his] energy is spent keeping still.”

Nevertheless, much happens to this supposedly fixed entity. The book starts in 1999, when a therapist who has been treating Marco’s wife, Marina, risks his career to tell Marco, “I have reason to believe you may be in grave danger.”

In chapters that incorporate text messages, emails, phone conversations, love letters and even poetry, Veronesi describes the events that shape Marco’s life, including his and his wife’s infidelities; his five-decade correspondence with a woman he loved since he was 20; the death of Marco’s sister and his estrangement from his brother; the difficulties facing his daughter, Adele, who met with a child psychologist when she was little because she felt she had a restrictive thread attached to her back; and Marco’s later guardianship of Adele’s daughter, Miraijin.

The Hummingbird is a moving, black-humored work about family and the tragedies born of time and poor decisions. Veronesi has created complicated characters that don’t always behave nobly, are products of their time and are, from a literary standpoint, the richer for it. As the omniscient narrator observes, “There are those who—not moving at all—still manage to cover great distances.” That’s the message of this wise book: A hummingbird may seem stationary, but in its way, it can cover a lot of ground.

The complicated characters in Sandro Veronesi’s novel don’t always behave nobly and are, from a literary standpoint, the richer for it.
FictionThriller

Anthem

Review by Michael Magras

Whatever one may think of Anthem, Noah Hawley’s latest literary thriller, no one could ever accuse the author and award-winning creator of the television series “Fargo” of skimping on plot. His action-stuffed follow-up to Before the Fall is an exciting cautionary tale that addresses just about every social ill facing Western civilization.

The action begins calmly enough: In 2009, a white judge named Margot Nadir and her second husband, a Black man named Remy, are watching their 9-year-old daughter, Story, sing the national anthem at a recital near their Brooklyn home. In a nice bit of foreboding, the Nadirs (one of the novel’s broad touches is their name) say they’re proud to “belong to the party of Lincoln” and feel that “the desire to belong, to be something, doesn’t make that dream come true.” As readers soon discover, their ambition, including Margot’s nomination to the Supreme Court, doesn’t shield them from real-world complexities and tragedies they could not have foreseen.

Hawley shifts the narrative a few years into the future, when a plague afflicts the world. As Hawley, one of the more skilled writers of pithy lines, puts it, “The summer our children began to kill themselves was the hottest in history.” Soon the crisis spreads worldwide, with more and more 12- to 25-year-olds taking their lives. Markets tank. Thousands die each day. And every victim scrawls “A11” near the site of their death.

Among them is Claire Oliver, the 17-year-old daughter of a pharmaceutical titan. Her death devastates her younger brother, Simon, who is sent to the Float Anxiety Abatement Center, where he hyperventilates into his omnipresent paper bag and contemplates the meaning of existence.

Hawley has further complications in store for Simon, and for the reader. An enigmatic Float resident who calls himself the Prophet tells Simon that God “has a mission for you”: to help build a new utopia. “The adults are lost. We, their children, are starting over.”

And that’s only the start. Anthem touches on just about every contentious topic one could name, from gun culture and climate change to race relations, extremist politicians and the “yelling box” that is the internet. The novel would have been stronger if Hawley had blended his themes more seamlessly into the narrative rather than letting his characters give speeches, but many of his painstakingly crafted scenes read like an action movie in book form. “We choose our reality,” one character says. Hawley’s novel reminds us to choose wisely.

“We choose our reality,” a character in Noah Hawley’s novel says. Anthem is a reminder to choose wisely.
Fiction

Bright Burning Things

Review by Michael Magras

Parenthood can be a challenge, albeit a rewarding one, even under ideal circumstances. If a parent is facing an illness, however, the challenge is far greater. That’s what Sonya Moriarty, a former stage actor with alcoholism who is raising her 4-year-old son alone in Dublin, contends with in Bright Burning Things, the latest novel from actor and playwright Lisa Harding.

Addiction seems to be the only constant that connects Sonya’s theatrical past and her maternal present. She even acknowledges that the ease with which she polishes off multiple bottles of wine in one sitting is “what made me such a great actress: extreme and electric.”

Extreme and electric are qualities she could get away with when directors bought fancy cars for her. Now that her world involves driving her beat-up old car to the grocery store to buy the orange-colored food that her son will eat, those attributes are less glamorous.

In a devastating early sequence, Sonya takes Tommy and their dog, Herbie, to the beach, only to get drunk that night, come dangerously close to burning down the house and wake up the next afternoon to find her son and dog missing.

The brisk narrative then shifts to Sonya’s attempts at maintaining sobriety and reclaiming her son’s trust. They begin when her father, absent from her life for the past two years, forces her to enter a rehabilitation program. Harding introduces characters who, for better or worse, affect Sonya’s efforts, from the neighbor who keeps a close eye on her to the nuns who care for her at the Catholic-run center and a counselor whose interest becomes more personal, and more insistent, as Sonya recovers.

Much of the story is predictable, but a ride can still be pleasant even when you know where you’re going. Sympathetic readers will feel pangs for Sonya’s experiences, and Harding’s descriptions of intensified sensations are unforgettable, from rain that “sounds like artillery fire” when it strikes a windowpane to cracks in the hospital ceiling that look like “portals to another world.” Bright Burning Things is a redemptive portrait of addiction and the extreme emotions of a parent in distress

The latest novel from actor-playwright Lisa Harding is a redemptive portrait of addiction and the extreme emotions of a parent in distress.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Still Life

Review by Michael Magras

“I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal,” Mr. Emerson tells Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s novel A Room With a View. It’s a beautiful sentiment, one that Sarah Winman incorporates into Still Life, along with other enduring realities, such as the transcendence of art and the pain of war.

Winman’s fourth novel is a gambol through some of the major events of the mid-20th century, and much of the action occurs in Italy. It opens in 1944, as Ulysses Temper, a young private in the British army, is driving through Florence. Evelyn Skinner, a 64-year-old English art historian, waves down his jeep. She’s in Italy to “liaise with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives officers” and locate artworks sequestered from museums and churches. He gives her a ride.

From there, Winman takes the reader through 35 years of world history, from World War II to the moon landing to natural disasters in Florence, as seen through the eyes of her characters.

After the war, Ulysses returns to London, where he resumes work on the globe-manufacturing business he took over from his father. He spends time at a pub called the Stout and Parrot, where denizens include Col, the owner; piano player Pete; Ulysses’ unfaithful spouse, Peg; their daughter, Alys; and a blue parrot named Claude.

An unexpected inheritance prompts Ulysses to leave London and return to Florence. Winman’s plot at times relies too heavily on moments of serendipity like this one, but readers will nonetheless be charmed by Ulysses’ attempts to set up a pensione, as well as by Evelyn’s parallel story and her many lovers, and the ways in which her life and Ulysses’ become linked.

Still Life is, ultimately, a celebration of Italy, with loving descriptions of its buildings and countryside, of old women gossiping on stone benches, of Tuscany’s “thick forests of chestnut trees and fields of sunflowers.” It’s light yet satisfying, like foamed milk atop a cappuccino.

Sarah Winman’s fourth novel is light yet satisfying, like foamed milk atop a cappuccino.
Fiction

Tales that pack a powerful punch

Feature by Michael Magras

Some people would have you believe that short stories are the literary equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues, a place to hone your skills until you’re ready for a bigger and more prestigious stage. But as masters such as Alice Munro have proven, a great short story is no less of an achievement than a great novel.

These four collections demonstrate that a new generation of authors is happy to experiment with the possibilities of the short form.

The most audacious collection here is Only the Animals by the South African and Australian writer Ceridwen Dovey. How’s this for a daring conceit: Each story is written from the perspective of an animal killed in a conflict wrought by humans. And an author appears in almost every narrative.

A cat owned by Colette escapes from the author’s car and witnesses horrors on the front lines in France during World War I. Chimpanzees in Germany who are being trained to adopt human characteristics become more refined even as food rationing dehumanizes men and women. A dolphin born into captivity writes to Sylvia Plath, “a human writer who meant something to me,” to explain the circumstances by which the dolphin performed echolocation activities for the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program.

Seeing events through an animal’s eyes gives us an outsider’s perspective on major events in recent history, including atrocities like the rise of Nazi Germany and the wars in the Middle East. In forcing us to do so, Dovey suggests that some animals have a capacity for empathy that humans would do well to emulate.

RUSSIAN JEWELS
The Tsar of Love and Techno is an intricately structured and powerful collection. These interconnected stories set in Russia span more than 70 years. They begin with the tale of Roman Markin, a “correction artist” who works for the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation. His job is to airbrush images of political dissenters out of photographs and paintings. One of the dissenters is his younger brother, Vaska.

In memory of his brother, Roman draws tiny portraits of Vaska in the pictures he censors, including a photo of a ballerina who looks like Vaska’s widow and a painting of a dacha in a pasture. The painting links tales of the ballerina’s granddaughter, a telephone operator at a nickel combine who wins the Miss Siberia pageant and marries the 14th richest man in Russia; a former deputy art director who, after the 1999 bombing of Chechnya, is forced to become head of the Chechen Tourist Bureau; and a soldier who carries a mix tape his brother gave him before his first tour of duty.

This collection showcases Marra’s wit and his gift for unforgettable details, such as when a soldier fires a round into the earth to loosen it before he digs a grave. Some characters are capable of great brutality, whereas others are capable of declaring that no invention is “more humane, more elegant, more generous” than the wheelchair ramp. The Tsar of Love and Techno is the work of an elegant and generous writer. 

EVERYDAY PROBLEMS
Lauren Holmes’ debut, Barbara the Slut and Other People, is lighter fare than the previous books, but don’t equate light with inconsequential. Holmes’ deceptively breezy stories focus on women grappling with sexual politics and make important observations about challenges faced by millennials.

A 20-year-old woman from Los Angeles travels to Acapulco to see her distant mother and to announce that she’s a lesbian. “Mike Anonymous” is a quietly devastating story of a woman who works at a clinic that helps people with sexually transmitted diseases, and of a married Japanese man convinced that he’s HIV positive. And in the title story, a high school senior applies to Princeton and struggles to lose the reputation she earned several times over in 11th grade.

Holmes, whose work has appeared in outlets like Granta and Guernica, has a keen ear for dialogue and a sharp memory for the high school life, as proven in the description of a student who “removed her retainer with her tongue and spit it onto her desk every time she was about to say something in class.” Barbara the Slut contains surprisingly tender depictions of love and family, which show that you should never judge a book by its title.

HOME TO KANSAS
Andrew Malan Milward focuses on the rich history of his home state of Kansas in his second collection, I Was a Revolutionary. Milward’s hometown of Lawrence has been the site of significant moments in American history, including pro-slavery guerrillas’ 1863 massacre of abolitionists—the largest act of domestic terrorism until the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He recreates many such historical moments in these stories.

The protagonist of “The Burning of Lawrence,” which chronicles the 1863 killings, is the Confederate guerrilla fighter William Quantrill. “The Americanist,” a modern-day story about a gay couple, invokes John Romulus Brinkley, the “Goat Gland Doctor” of the 1920s who injected goat testicles into men to improve their virility. “What Is to Be Done?” presents the eccentric sculptor Samuel Perry Dinsmoor, a retired teacher who, in later years, was known to lecture about socialism to a roomful of invisible students.

Milward’s habit of providing excessive historical detail diminishes the tension at times, but when he minimizes background information, as he does in the brilliant title piece, the results are compelling. There are lovely, unexpected touches: A pro-slavery fighter in “The Burning of Lawrence” trashes an abolitionist’s home, but pauses long enough to play the family’s organ with “long-dormant familiarity.” 

Throughout the book, Milward makes astute observations about politics, not only about the political climate of past eras but also of our own—a rarity in contemporary American fiction.

Who says short-story writers occupy a low rung on the literary hierarchy? As these collections prove, great short fiction not only is its own major league but also boasts an impressive lineup that any contingent would envy.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Some people would have you believe that short stories are the literary equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues, a place to hone your skills until you’re ready for a bigger and more prestigious stage. But as masters such as Alice Munro have proven, a great short story is no less of an achievement than a great novel. These four collections demonstrate that a new generation of authors is happy to experiment with the possibilities of the short form.
Fiction

Novel takes on democracy

Feature by Michael Magras

Whatever one may think of politics, one has to concede that elections provide juicy material for works of fiction. Two new novels offer very different portraits of modern politics, yet share common traits, including an insider’s view of the political process and sacrifices required in the quest for power.

The feistier of the two novels is The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear, by Stuart Stevens, a political consultant who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. The Dow has plummeted, and the government has divided Google into separate companies. When the incumbent Republican president chooses not to seek re-election, two candidates vie to replace him: Hilda Smith, the sitting vice-president, and Armstrong George, the fire-breathing Colorado governor who—sound familiar?—wants to build a large security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The narrator is J.D. Callahan, Smith’s campaign manager, who hopes a Smith victory will help him become a pundit with his own TV show. First, however, he has to get through the GOP convention, which, coincidentally, is in Callahan’s native New Orleans. His job is complicated, however, by his two half-brothers: one a former felon who wants financial help for his run for public office, and the other a neo-Nazi who owns a strip club and may be responsible for bombs that have imperiled the convention. The humor may be too broad for some readers, but this funny, fast-paced novel offers a perspective that only a seasoned campaign strategist like Stevens could provide.

Jennifer Close’s latest, The Hopefuls, set during the first six years of the Obama administration, is a more somber affair. Beth, our narrator, moves from her beloved New York to D.C. so her husband, Matt, can pursue his dream of entering politics. (Close moved to D.C. with her own husband, who also worked on the Obama campaign.)

Shortly after their arrival, Matt and Beth meet Jimmy Dillon, who works in the White House travel office, and his wife, Ashleigh, a Texas gal who tells Beth minutes after meeting her, “I can just tell we’re going to be best friends.”

The couples grow close, but Matt soon becomes jealous of Jimmy’s more exciting job, with duties that include flying to Hawaii to perform advance work for the Obamas’ vacation and playing golf with the President. After Obama’s re-election, Jimmy moves to Texas with Ashleigh to run for railroad commissioner and asks Matt to manage his campaign. But the campaign puts a strain on both marriages, especially when Jimmy starts spending time alone with Beth. 

Unlike Stevens’ book, The Hopefuls focuses on a retail form of politics: going door-to-door, attending church picnics, canvassing for votes. Yet both novels entertain with keenly observed inner-circle perspectives and shrewd insight into how personal politics can become.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Whatever one may think of politics, one has to concede that elections provide juicy material for works of fiction. Two new novels offer very different portraits of modern politics, yet share common traits, including an insider’s view of the political process and sacrifices required in the quest for power.

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