American Fiction, Volume 12 Edited by Kristen J. Tsetsi
Guest Judge: Josip Novakovich
Review by Emily Wojcik
November 28, 2012
Fiction collections are a tricky business, and none more so than those that aim to compile “the best” of anything—in this case, “the best unpublished stories by emerging writers,” as the title page promises. I say “tricky” because if one is prone to cynicism (as this critic is occasionally), the urge to be reactionary can be difficult to subdue. What makes these stories the “best,” and by what standards? How do you define “emerging” anyway? And does the “American” of the title lend the stories a yet unearned canonical gravitas (recalling, say, Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver), or does it simply provoke an arbitrary nationalism?
These are the kinds of questions that came to mind when I received the aforementioned collection, the latest in an annual series published by New Rivers Press, from Minnesota State University Moorhead. New Rivers is dedicated to publishing “imaginative work from emerging and established writers,” a potentially risky goal when it comes to short fiction. The stories published in American Fiction Volume 12 represent the winner, runners up, and honorable mentions of the New Rivers annual fiction contest, judged this year by Josip Novakovich, a Croatian-American-Canadian writer for whom nationality is more a problem to be wrestled with than a point of pride. Indeed, given his own background and style, Novakovich is an intriguing choice for judging such a collection, and the resulting stories challenge many of the snarky assumptions behind my initial reservations. Continue reading →
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Risky Business
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Love, In Theory By E.J. Levy
Review by Amanda Mead
October 29, 2012
Author E.J. Levy navigates the topography of intellectual love to an often times troubled affect in the 2012 fiction collection Love, In Theory. Flannery O’Conner award winner for short fiction, these ten stories measure betrayal, passion, and heartbreak against scholarly “theories” that illuminate what it means to be in a relationship in the information age.
The majority of Levy’s characters are academics: a professor of creative writing at a small town university, a graduate film student relocating from Colorado to Ohio, and a self-proclaimed philosopher who suggests that love is a “messer-upper.” Despite a deft acquisition of book smarts, these characters are stumped when it comes to love. If there are ways to explain the physics behind string theory, or constants and variables in a mathematic equation, then what makes deconstructing our most intimate relationships an exception? Continue reading →
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Physician, Heal Thyself
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Kore: On Sickness, the Sick and the Search for the Soul of Medicine By Andrzej Szczeklik
Review by Emily Wojcik
October 23, 2012
It is a privilege to be healthy, one that we egregiously take for granted when we are well and become all too aware of once we have lost it. Literature about illness is a mainstay of the contemporary memoir—there are books detailing battles with cancer, anorexia, bipolar disorder, the loss of limbs, strokes, childhood diseases—as well as popular tomes about the quirky or tragic histories of such maladies and their cures.
While the illness memoir may be a relatively new phenomenon, the worlds of literature and medicine have long been interconnected, particularly for practitioners in the field. Western literature is full of doctors who were also writers or artists, from Copernicus to Anton Chekov to William Carlos Williams and, today, Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, and others. This should perhaps be unsurprising. As Andrzej Szczeklik makes clear in Kore: On Sickness, the Sick and the Search for the Soul of Medicine, medicine has long been as much about interpretation and narrative, metaphysics and superstition, as it is about diagnosis and treatment.
Szczeklik, who passed away in January of this year, was chairman of the department of medicine at Poland’s Jagiellonian University, and author of Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine, an earlier work of similarly thoughtful essays. In this philosophical exploration of the “soul of medicine,” Szczeklik takes the reader through a brief history of the profession, interspersed with his own autobiography and digressions into specific maladies and breakthroughs that changed the way we think about the body. Continue reading →
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Beyond the Pale
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The White Forest by Adam McOmber
Review by Emily Wojcik
October 15, 2012
When a lonely girl with a baffling “gift”—the ability to see the souls of man-made objects—meets an aristocratic young man and a moody, beautiful young woman, intrigue, jealousy, and the supernatural are bound to follow. Particularly when their friendship is set against the backdrop of gothic London, some time in the mid-nineteenth century, as the Crimean War comes to an end and the western world teeters on the brink of modernity.
As many authors before him have discovered, it’s a setup rich with creative possibility, and in his first novel, The White Forest, Adam McOmber balances the clichés of the genre with gorgeous writing and a dense, twisting plot. The dark corners of a dying aristocracy, and the inevitable triangles that result when bored teenagers find themselves thrown together on the grounds of a half-abandoned manor are in full force. Yet McOmber follows them to intriguing new places, pushing beyond youthful angst to explore the thin line between curiosity and obsession, religion and the occult, love and madness. Continue reading →
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Mapping the Void
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The Invisibles by Hugh Sheehy
Review by Josie E. Davis
October 12, 2012
In the opening pages of The Invisibles, the 2012 Flannery O’Conner prize winner for short fiction, author Hugh Sheehy creates a landscape so bleak and ordinary that the obscurity, horror, and ambiguity of what happens next is a near contrast to the sublime. The collection begins with “Meat and Mouth,” in which Luke Dixon, a mournfully peevish character whose refuge from an ultimately disposable father is likened by his own invisibility at school – Dixon’s attempt at personifying and mentally defeating his daytime bully, Davey Schwartz, is thwarted by an all too real hostage situation controlled by two much older and armed former students. The story’s narrator, Maddy, “cradles” Dixon to sleep in the school boiler room after witnessing Meat kill off Dixon’s father in cold blood. The gravity of adulthood and a series of irreconcilable psychologies leave Maddy to consider how and if Luke Dixon will “beat the odds” of a future easily disrepaired by solemn and selfless choices – and seemingly indefinite time.
The collection revolves from one “invisible” to another and stories pronounce, with a terrific thrill, the darker and more dreaded turns in life that leave the reader falling “through the cracks” and forever wanting to be seen. Sheehy makes his mark in fiction with a vast range of characters – missing and invisible, disconsolate and notorious in their longing for revenge; near addicts and the unborn – calling out from the most conventional and hapless Americana. This is Sheehy’s gift: balancing the horrific and the humane in stories that exfoliate the more painful triumphs of American adulthood. Continue reading →
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God is my Lobbyist: Politics, Religion, and the War on Welfare
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Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Welfare in the United States
By Jason Hackworth
Review by Emily Wojcik
September 25, 2012
Those of us who watched in mild confusion as the Tea Party became a significant political force in a matter of two years—despite its angry and, at times, incoherent blend of libertarian ethos and quasi-religious placards—will find in Faith Based a welcome guidebook to the wilderness of conservative politics. At once a critical history of the more conservative arm of the contemporary Right; a penetrating sociopolitical analysis of the party’s dismantling of social programs, particularly welfare; and a theoretical exploration of the ramifications thereof, Jason Hackworth’s study is a timely and welcome addition to the crowded field of political tomes.
Hackworth, a professor of geography and urban planning at the University of Toronto, tackles a subject that most of us know very little about—the intersection of neoliberalism and fundamentalist Christianity in the United States—and does so in a way that is clear and very readable despite the preponderance of research (this book is intended for other scholars). I don’t mean to imply that having done his work thoroughly is a problem; it’s refreshing to read a book that tackles a potentially explosive subject so comprehensively without falling back on bombast and snark. But Hackworth’s style is otherwise so engaging that the depth of research can feel a bit oppressive to the more casual reader—one hopes that he might one day write a book for a lay readership. Continue reading →
American Fiction, Volume 12