The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
While a short story collection can be knitted together in a lot of different ways—character, theme, setting, subject matter or tone—how tightly it should be woven is less defined. Some collections are so knotted that all the life is wrung out of them.
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Marisa Silver in her new novel, Mary Coin, takes all this on and the result is a compelling, hard-to-put down story. As the cover of the novel suggests, the story emanates from the photograph, “Migrant Mother,” taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936 at a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California.
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In late 1928, the left-wing playwright Friedrich Wolf wrote, “Let’s hope 1929 brings us plenty of struggle, friction, and sparks.”
He got his wish. In 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed. Within weeks, the U.S. cut off the flow of loans to Germany and began demanding repayment on outstanding loans.
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The very act of writing is a kind of magic. Small black etchings on paper conjure up worlds, people, events, transporting you, the reader, to a different place, a different time. Really, it’s one short leap from “spell” and “casting a spell” to “spelling.”
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In Inner Workings J.M. Coetzee writes about his (former) fellow South African writer, Nadine Gordimer: she was highly influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Algerian-born Albert Camus. In particular she adheres to Sartre’s view of the writer: “The function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it is all about.”
Since her debut collection, Face to Face, in 1949, Gordimer has taken up the role of writer-as-witness to South Africa.
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Tupelo Hassman’s debut Girlchild is an emotionally rich and complex picture of a smart girl brutalized and circumscribed by circumstances.
Christopher Bollen’s debut novel, Lightning People, thick with detail and plot, paints New York through five main characters, transplanted 30-somethings in Manhattan, where from May and June lightning came without rain.
Alexander Maksik’s debut novel You Deserve Nothing reshapes an old story—predatory teacher and young student.
In This Light, a collection of Melanie Rae Thon’s short stories, shows the writer’s shifts in the last twenty years, while reminding us of her powerful, haunting storytelling.
Laura Furman’s new concerto of stories, The Mother Who Stayed, ties its parts together in an illuminating and subtle fashion.
Deb Olin Unferth’s ruefully funny memoir revisits the year she followed her boyfriend into the war zones of Latin America.
A collection of linked stories set at Fort Hood convey the loneliness and strain experienced by military families.