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Fiction
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Lorrie Moore may be America's most beguiling writer. Her fiction mixes deft, probing humor with a keen understanding of the way comedy bubbles up most freely (and most truly) through discomfort, tragedy, awkwardness and loss. She seems incapable of writing a dull sentence. "Birds of America" is her third short-story collection; it is also her best. Moore throws her characters into difficult situations (illnesses, holidays, road trips) and then stands back to record, in intimate detail, the emotional reverberations. In a story called "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," a woman notes the stages of grief she goes through after the death of her cat (Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, Rage). The only grief you'll feel at the end of "Birds of America" is that it's over far too soon. "Birds of America":
No sooner do we bemoan the dearth of ambitious American women novelists of ideas than Andrea Barrett delivers this grand, intelligent, wide-ranging work. With elegance and economy, she's pulled off a seemingly impossible feat: critiquing the complacent authority of the 19th century novel in a book that's just as much fun to read as an old-fashioned Victorian opus. If that description strikes some of you as unduly cerebral, we hasten to add that "Voyage of the Narwhal" is also a harrowing tale of arctic adventure, the story of an ill-fated, seagoing, 1855 expedition whose leaders quarrel over whether their goal is to track down a party of lost explorers or to make a few discoveries of their own. What the survivors of this foray into the realm of ice and death learn to their chagrin is how our hunger for simple stories of heroism and villainy often blinds us, or at the very least, leads us into endless arguments about what really happened and who's to blame. Followers of the controversy over Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air," take note. "The Voyage of the Narwhal":
Who would have thought that a 76-year-old Portuguese novelist -- even one who picked up this year's Nobel Prize -- would write 1998's most propulsive, and most profound, thriller? Saramago's novel reads like a fever dream. Set in an unnamed European city, "Blindness" is about a population struck by a rolling plague of "white blindness." No one knows where it came from, no one knows how -- or if -- it will ever end. Saramago digs deeply into the multiple meanings of blindness, but at the same time he keeps a fire lit under his narrative. We follow a host of characters through a series of trials as they're forced into quarantine in a mental institution and later left to wander streets that are quickly filling up with feces, corpses and utter mayhem. "There are many ways of becoming an animal," one character muses as he notes the way society is falling apart around him. But Saramago's characters, and his book, retain a powerful and compelling humanity. "Blindness" is impossible to put down. "Blindness":
A stealth winner, this novel, with its unassuming style and modest scope, became the one we couldn't forget after we thought we'd moved on to grander, more highly acclaimed books. The four characters in Morton's story of contemporary Manhattan life -- an obscure intellectual novelist at the end of his life, the bold young grad student who wants to make him the subject of her thesis, his dancer daughter and her mixed-race lover -- have a mercurial humanity that's uncannily true to life. Like Henry James -- an obvious influence who makes a ghostly appearance at one point in the novel -- Morton shows us very particular social types (the idealistic Jewish novelist who came of age in the 1950s, the chaotically romantic and ambitious young literature student thrilling to East Village readings) without flattening them into caricatures. Full of shrewd observations ("You desire the woman who intimidates the woman you desire," one character muses), "Starting Out in the Evening" may at first look like a pleasant snack, but it turns out to be a banquet. "Starting Out in the Evening":
Moscow, Paris, Belgrade, Dublin -- those are a few of the cities young American writer Ken Kalfus has called home over the past decade. Kalfus' wanderlust shows in this sparkling debut collection of short fiction; thematically and stylistically, these stories cover a lot of ground. In a playful story called "The Joy and Melancholy Baseball Trivia Quiz," for example, he employs imaginary sports factoids to get at deeper truths about what games mean to us, and in "Invisible Malls," with its descriptions of fantastical shopping centers, he riffs knowingly on Italo Calvino. Kalfus also has the ability, however, to spin out narratives that are as tense, spare and driving as Hemingway's best stories. Don't exit this collection without reading "No Grace on the Road," a stunning story, set in an unnamed South Asian country during a vicious late-night rainstorm, about a medical mishap that tests a European-educated officer's loyalty to his native country. With "Thirst," Ken Kalfus proves himself to be among the most dexterous young talents in American letters. "Thirst":
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