Three short story collections, an anthology, and a review essay collection

Confession:  I have read a lot of wonderful short fiction collections this year.  I have also read some that did not appeal to me.  Chances are, if it's a recent SF/F anthology/collection, I did not enjoy it as much as I did those not marketed as such (one such collection will be reviewed in the next week or so), perhaps due to changing tastes or just a general lack of narrative energy and experimentation.  I also am going to write a few words about a writer/lit critic/professor whose reviews, even when I disagree with them, often serve to remind me how much further I could go as a critic if I felt so inclined (sometimes, I feel more inclined to just skim over the sludgy mediocre stories in favor of those that didn't suck quite so much, other times it's all about the squirrel readers; the price I had to pay for reading/reviewing so many books this year).  Some of these works you might enjoy much more than I did; others might be less appealing.  But here they are, in an even-more condensed version than what Reader's Digest could ever hope to pull off:

Dorothy Tse, Snow and Shadow (translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman)

Snow and Shadow is testimony to the ability of writers to employ surrealistic techniques skillfully irrespective of culture or language.  Tse's stories are mostly set in a warped, sometimes grisly Hong Kong, in which women may turn into fish, or a wicked queen might attempt to graft a pig's trotter onto the amputated arm sockets of young women.  Harman does a good job in making Tse's use of weird, grotesque images seem as though they were originally composed in English.  There are few dull stories in this collection; many succeed in creating unsettling settings for some truly odd happenings.  While not every story is pitch-perfect, there are enough solid to very good efforts to make this debut English-language collection worthwhile for readers who enjoy surrealist and weird fiction.

Justin Taylor, Flings

It is almost clichéd to claim that a short story collection contains a mixture of good and not-so-great stories.  Yet there are times where one might read a collection and wonder between stories if the same writer composed the two, because one is so much better than the other that it is difficult to believe the same pen composed the twain.  This is the case with Justin Taylor's latest collection, Flings.  Roughly half of these stories are standard lit fare, replete with familiar characters and cozy plots and mundane action.  The characters in these stories might as well be engaging in one-off flings for the lack of depth and vitality that they possess.  Yet there are a handful of stories that manage to go beyond the mechanistic entities of the other tales and become something moving, vibrant beyond the author's obvious talent for writing.  In tales such as "Sungold" or "Poets," Taylor provides the reader with enough glimpses of his abilities that it is frustrating to read his lesser works, because it is plain by collection's end that he has the potential to write tales that could approach the level of some of the finest short fiction writers of the past half-century.  Maybe in his next collection he'll realize this potential.  As it stands, Flings is a solid yet uneven collection.

Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress

Atwood is a difficult writer to sum up in a few pithy sentences.  Not only is she a talented writer on the technical level, but her stories also tend to contain profound themes, memorable characters, and situations that challenge reader preconceptions on several "hot topic" issues.  The nine stories in her latest collection, Stone Mattress, largely live up to reader expectations.  There are surprising revenges, intriguing revelations, and tales that consciously and confidently brush aside issues of genre identification in order to narrate tales that engage the reader without feeling too oblique or too transparent in construction or execution.  Stone Mattress might not be Atwood's best work, but it certainly ranks comfortably with several of her other collections and novels.

Adam Roberts, Sibilant Fricative:  Essays & Reviews

Confession:  I have a difficult time pronouncing "sibilant."  I frequently confound it somehow with silibant, which would make for an odd pun if one were pondering the merits of (unintentionally) comic novels.  Puns of course being something with which followers of Roberts' Twitter account would be familiar.  That weakness being confessed, here's another:  Roberts is one of the best lit critics writing today, especially for those who deign to treat topics as varied as Robert Browning, Gene Wolfe, Christopher Priest, Maurice Sendak and Robert Jordan.  Yes, Roberts' essays run the gamut from breaking down complex fictions into interesting, illuminating reviews to bringing to the fore Jordan's unfortunate penchant for writing quasi-clothing and tea porn.  There are times where I disagreed with his conclusions but admired the way he argued his points.  Then there were the times that I wanted to laugh aloud at how adroitly he could skewer a plot that deserved to die the death of a thousand pinpricks.  If this isn't a testimony to how good Roberts is as a reviewer, then perhaps I should just say go forth and buy a copy and find out for yourself.

Neil Clarke (ed.), Upgraded:  A Cyborg Anthology

There is a passage in the New Testament book of Revelation that talks about a church being like lukewarm water, fit only to be spewed out of the mouth.  "Lukewarm" is perhaps the most fit descriptor for this anthology of stories that deal with humans being augmented or in some form or fashion becoming "cyborgs."  There was nothing overtly offensive in any of these tales from a diverse mix of young and established SF writers, but neither was there anything memorable at all.  It took over three months for me to finish this anthology because so few stories had any real interest or appeal to me after the first few paragraphs.  Maybe it was the theme, but I suspect it is more the case that recent SF/F short fiction (not that older SF/F was better on any technical or narrative level) just leaves me cold.  There are few glaring problems with prose or characterization other that one feels cold and the other just merely lifeless. This is an issue that goes beyond this particular anthology, making Upgraded merely emblematic for the larger malaise that I feel is afflicting current SF/F short fiction.  Reading this anthology after reading several solid to outstanding non-SF/F collections and anthologies this year only underscores just how devoid of prose mastery or character nuances the SF/F collections/anthologies that I've read in recent years tend to be.  As I said above, this anthology left a lukewarm feeling, thus I spat out these thoughts.

Five more books mini-reviewed: two lit award-longlisted titles and three novels

As we enter the final month of 2014, I still have nearly four dozen reviews left to write if I am going to meet my goal of writing something about every 2014 US release that I read.  There are some quality works in this set of five mini-reviews, works that perhaps deserve more space.  Then again, there is a challenge to crystallizing thoughts into 3-5 sentences, something that hopefully readers here can appreciate, maybe as they glance at posts like this for inspiration for holiday book purchases.

J.M. McDermott, Maze

Mazes, or perhaps labyrinths would be a more fitting synonym for what transpires in McDermott's latest novel, too often are, in the minds of many readers at least, more about solving and less about coming to terms with the oft-inexplicable nature of them.  McDermott does not set out to "solve" anything in this wonderfully complex and multilayered story of people (or machines, or beings, etc.) caught up in a labyrinth that moves through mythological, scientific, and metaphysical realms, leaving the reader to sort through what may or may not be of paramount importance here.  McDermott's prose is more than up to the task of conveying this sense of semantical and plot confusion and while there are few, if any, mysteries solved by the novel's end, the journey is more than worth the effort necessary in order to grasp the multitude of meanings and concepts that McDermott packs into this novel.

Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (2014 National Book Award-longlisted title for Fiction)

The nine stories in McCracken's latest title contain some of the more moving moments of any short story collection that I have read this year.  McCracken's characters go through times of trial and suffering and their coping strategies, while not perfect, are so familiar and yet worded in such a pitch-perfect fashion that it is easy for the reader to empathize with their plights.  Her deft turns of phrase, coupled with these deep, penetrating looks into human reactions to suffering and self-doubt make Thunderstruck & Other Stories one of the more memorable short fiction collections in a year chock full of excellent collections by new and established masters of the short story form.

Lucius Shepard, Beautiful Blood

This year bore the sad news of the passing of Lucius Shepard.  A talented SF writer, his prose, especially in his short fiction, was some of the best genre writing I have ever read.  Yet there are wide swathes of his fiction with which I am unfamiliar, including the dragon Griaule tales, the setting of which his posthumous novel Beautiful Blood takes place.  Beautiful Blood was excellently-written, yet my unfamiliarity with the other Griaule tales made for a sometimes-confusing moments.  Yet the original takes on dragons and cities near them ultimately made for an enjoyable, rewarding reading experience.  Certainly a novel that fans of Shepard's previous writing will want to read.

Josh Weil, The Great Glass Sea

Weil's debut novel, set in an alternate present-day, post-Communist Russia, begins with an audacious SFish public project that sounds similar to similarly outlandish Soviet projects:  the utilization of giant reflective space mirrors in order to create near-continuous daylight in a remote Russian town.  While the concept may sound ridiculous, Weil manages to make it just plausible enough (it helps that he does a good job with developing characters and their reactions to this project) that it is easy for the reader to suspend disbelief.  Yet there are times where the action falters and the dialogue lags, making The Great Glass Sea a flawed yet mostly enjoyable first effort.

Spencer Reece, The Road to Emmaus (2014 National Book Award-longlisted title for Poetry)

Readers familiar with the New Testament accounts of the Resurrection should immediately recognize the scene hinted at in the title and eponymous poem.  Reece's poetry collection revolves around a middle-aged Episcopal priest who during his travels across the globe encounters a similar range of sinners and sufferers to what Jesus might have embraced both before and following his crucifixion.  Reece's poems contain a subtlety of voice and shades of meaning that contrast excellently with his in-depth exploration of faith in the midst of suffering and the search for understanding.  The Road to Emmaus I thought would have made for an excellent choice for the National Book Award shortlist and while it was not chosen, it certainly is one of the better poetry collections that I have read in recent years.

2009 Anthologies and Story Collections Read/Owned to Date

Since in three months or so I'll be posting my Best of 2009 list, I thought I'd take stock of the short fiction published in some new form or fashion in 2009 that I've read. This is not in chronological order or in level of preference:

Short Story Collections:

1. Peter S. Beagle, We Never Talk About My Brother

2. Caitlín R. Kiernan, A is for Alien

3. Otsuichi, ZOO

4. Terrence Holt, In the Valley of the Kings

5. Tobias Buckell, Tides from the New World

6. Brian Evenson, Fugue State


Anthologies (single-author and multiple authors):

7. John Davey, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, The Best of Michael Moorcock

8. Nick Gevers and Jay Lake, Other Earths

9. Gianpaolo Celli, Steampunk: Histórias de um Passado Extraordinário

10. Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar, Philippine Speculative Fiction IV

11. Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions: 52: Betwixt the Between

12. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Best American Fantasy 2

13. Lavie Tidhar, The Apex Book of World SF


In Progress:

14. George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, Songs of the Dying Earth

15. Vincent Michael Simbulan, A Time for Dragons: An Anthology of Philippine Draconic Fiction

16. John Scalzi, Metatropolis


On Order:

16. Jonathan Strahan, Eclipse 3

17. Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales (two vols.)


Not too bad, I suppose, but I'm not satisfied with this. What anthologies/collections released in 2009 in the US (or first elsewhere in the world) am I missing that I ought to acquire so I can consider for inclusion in my wrapup on 2009 short fiction books?

Terrence Holt, In the Valley of the Kings

The first case of which any record survives was reported in a small-town daily in upstate New York. Tabitha Van Order, the brief item reads, age five, was brought into the county hospital's emergency room with "strange markings" on her face and hands. "She was playing with the newspaper," her mother reported. "I thought it was just the ink rubbed off on her." But the marks did not respond to soap or turpentine. At the hospital, initial examination determined that the marks were subcutaneous, and the child was admitted for observation. They looked, according to the triage nurse, as though someone had been striking the child with a large rubber stamp. "They look like bruises," the emergency-room physician told the Journal reporter. The department of social services was looking into the case. (p. 11)

The opening story to Terrence Holt's debut story collection In the Valley of the Kings, " 'Ο Λογοσ", serves as a represenative piece. The opening paragraph quoted above sets the stage for an apocalyptic tale to follow, as one by one, "word" by "word," people are infected with a new plague that is carried not by microbes, but instead by the etching of "the word" on their flesh. Holt's matter-of-fact, clinical prose (he has alternated between being a writing instructor, medical doctor, and storywriter for the past 15 years) is all the more chilling here because the reader knows something dreadful is happening, but the prose purposely understates this in order to allow the reader's imagination to create more and more dreadful consequences for what is transpiring within the story. By the time the final paragraph is reached, the tension has built to the point that one begins to wonder if the narrator has gone mad...or if we will.

The second story, "My Father's Heart," is much shorter (5 pages compared to the 16 devoted for the first story), but it too contains an unsettling image:

I have raged at it of late: Leech, I cry: Blooksucker. It burps clear saline in mild protest; innocence sits on every valve. I am not taken in. It has not been so many years since I have seen it raging in its turn, swollen to the size of a dirigible, as full of gas and fire, stopping raffic across four lanes of Sixth Avenue. A cab driver had refused to carry it: "I don't haul meat." I spent the balance of that day in terror, cradling the jar in my lap (we took a bus), looking into it each time the saline sloshed. It refused to look up. (p. 29)

The imagery would have been at home in an Edgar Allan Poe story; the juxtaposition of the mudane (taking the bus) and the unreal (the heart being sentient and prone to outbursts) serving to underscore the strangeness of the situation. The resolution to this story is emotional, not as it was in the first, but in a way that reminded me of how family members, whether or not their hearts literally act for themselves, clash and bond over crises.

The third story, "Charybdis," takes the story of Oddysseus's shipwreck and transports it to a futuristic Jupiter mission. The prose here is very evocative, as Holt creates a sense of loss, bafflement, confusion, and boredom, as this paragraph reveals:

I have been floating here in silence since, thinking of my alternatives, to stop at Jupiter or travel on: the journy outward, into silence so thick as to become something: a pressure, a presence here with me. As weight surrounds a mass, so silence would fill the air around me, falling in, rising from blood rustling in my ears to become a whisper, a word spoken, a cry, the roar of burning and finally the crash of everything that falls. Beyond Pluto, silence would be more than absence of speech: even zero has meaning, but what is zero taken to an infinite power? And on what fingers do I count it? Thought I could hear the singing of the sphere, see colors off the spectrum, touch nothing: how could I tell? and whom? (p. 40)

From this, Holt constructs a tale that is as much about the effects of passivity as action. What are the effects of pressure, real and imagined? How would we break if put into such a situation? Would it be a glorious thing, or a tedious one? The questions raised from reading this story added to its written prose.

"Aurora" is in many ways a complementary piece to "Charybdis." Set in the rings of Saturn, the story again plays with the notion of transcribing human experience with the near Sublime. But whereas "Charybdis" captured a darker side, "Aurora" tends to focus on the lighter, more numinous qualities of a rapturous moment:

On another revolution I see it rise again out of the Ring before me. On its long outward reach, as it dwindles to a star it seems to slow; it seems to stop; it is not falling. It is motionless against the stars. I am aching with envy.

I know it must be falling.

It hangs, as if motionless, but holds its station, high above and far ahead. It is falling. I stare at it, my cameras resisting commands to turn to the ice. I am fascinated. Why has it climbed so high? What is this within me that yearns? (p. 68)

"Eurydike" refers not just to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also to the haunting nature of some of our innermost desires. As with the other tales, Holt uses a first-person narrative to create the sense of bafflement and intrepid curiosity:

I looked: only the corridor receding into deeper shadow, the light flickering, and in the walls everywhere vague shapes were shifting, like frescoes long since painted over struggling to return. I shuddered, and as I did the shapes within the walls all shuddered too. The cold was coming back, the systems continuing their fall toward equilibrium. A wave flowed down the corridor, beckoning. The figures writhed. (p. 98)

The centerpiece of In the Valley of the Kings is the eponymous novella that comprises 1/3 of this 224 page collection. In it, Holt touches upon several of the themes alluded to in the comments above and he expands them into an exploration of the concepts of immortality. Using the Eyptian pharoanic tombs as a setting, Holt crafts a first-person narrative that is superb. The feel of the narrator's desire to uncover the mystery behind an unnamed pharoah and his tomb, the quest to discover if that pharoah had uncovered a mystical Word (perhaps a reference to the first story in passing?), the desire to possess something of immortality - these elements strike near to the heart of several human motives in life. In many ways, these motives in our lives come close to the narrator's, as he describes them:

At first, I ignored it. At night, as I tried to sleep, it would pulse faintly, tinged with red at its borders. At times it disappeared entirely. Now it is always before me, always there at the center of my vision, a pool of ink, a hole opened in the world, a tunnel toward which I constantly move. I know already where it leads. (p. 118)

"Scylla" is the second-shortest story in this collection at ten pages. It is in many ways a reflection upon "Charybdis," in that instead of being sucked into a maelstrom, the character passes perilously close to the insatiable claws of what is referred to as "the Law." The narrator experiences a loss to this "Law," only in which this entity (being?) bears the inevitability of Loss and perhaps Death:

And so this was what the Law must be, I told myself, and felt already the strength of its claim on me. I felt it in the easy acquiescence to the loss of my ship, a ship I had not even had the chance to go down with. At low tide, I prowled the breakwater, but not a mast stuck out above the glassy harbor. A flock of pigeons broke from the steeple, wheeled once above the seaward channel, and I knew then that my ship had gone that way, and I remembered suddenly that none of us, in our eagerness for shore, had bothered to secure her. She had simply drifted out to sea. And this, I knew, must be the Law as well - not the tide, but our forgetting of our duty. (pp. 195-196)

The final story, "Apocalypse," presents readers with a look at what follows when the party is over, when the anguish, grief, love, despair, confusion, hope, and desire have played their courses. It is in some respects about coping, about reconciliation, and of course, about the ancient meaning of the word "apocalypse":

Part of me feels certain this cannot be, that all of us are in a dream, a mass psychosis: the second week of January will come after all, and we will waken, grinning at ourselves. The other part of me feels the emptiness in those words. (p. 206)

But the end of dreams and self-delusions is not necessarily bad. In many respects, the final paragraph to "Apocalyse" could serve as the epigraph for In the Valley of the Kings:

But before the end we will speak once more, of everything that matters: of the brightness of the moon; of the birds still flying dark against the sky; of the man who brought me here; of the hours that she waited; of what wwe would name the child; of the grace of everything that dies; of the love that moves the sun and other stars. (p. 223)

Through it all, In the Valley of the Kings is a true tour de force of exploring the human condition(s). At times, I was reminded of the best of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. Holt's prose tantalizes. It hints, it promises, but at the end there are no true revelations within the text itself. It is up to the reader to fill in the spots purposely left blank. It is up to the reader to provide meaning, to establish hope, to ward off despair. Holt's collection simply is great, provocative storytelling at its best and it deserves serious consideration for any and all awards for which it may be eligible.

Publication Date: August 2009 (US). Hardcover.

Publisher: W.W. Norton and Company

Conjunctions 51: The Death Issue

Death is the great mystery that has bedeviled us for as long as humans or their ancestors developed the first spark of self-consciousness. It appears in so many guises in our stories, from Shakespeare's "the undiscover'd country, from whose bourn no traveller returns" to Neil Gaiman's sweet, goth-like girl. To define death would be to define the whole range of human experiences, emotions, as well as our hopes, dreams, and fears.

Lately, death has been on my mind. Two days ago, on March 25, I learned that a high school classmate of mine had died after a years-long battle with leukemia. Although he and I were never close (he was two years older than me and had struggled to stay in school until 18, when he dropped out), he is the second person in my high school class (we had as many as 71, with 58 graduating in 1992) to die. It is a sobering realization, knowing that cancer can take the young as well as the old. That, more than gray hairs, middle-age spreads, or achy joints, serves to remind people of their mortality.

What is there about death that entices us, scares us, makes us do all sorts of things to embrace it or attempt (vainly) to flee from it? What power does it have that can drive a person away from the bedside of a loved one (I almost vomited seeing my maternal grandfather in the ICU as the doctors tried to resuscitate him a second time; I left the hospital two hours before he died, because I just couldn't bear the emotional atmosphere there any longer. Still haunted by those dreams), while another frantically rushes to be there for that one final, bittersweet moment?

In the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Conjunctions, called The Death Issue: Meditations on the Inevitable, 42 authors weigh in with their poems and short stories on this most mysterious of human experiences. The result is a powerful, sometimes disturbing collection of stories that showcase all the myriad emotions that the living can feel when confronted with death and with the dying.

The collection opens with Sallie Tisdale's "The Sutra of Maggots and Blowfish." Tisdale combines scientific inquiry into the brief lives and deaths of ephemeral insects with Buddhist reflections on suffering and loss. Below are a couple of excerpts that cut to the heart of her story:

My study of living things, part inquiry and part the urge to possess, became inevitably a study of predation and decay. I had to feed my pets, and most preferred live food. The mantises always died, their seasons short. The chameleons died, too delicate for my care. The alligator died. I tried to embalm it, with limited success - just good enough for an excellent presentation at show-and-tell. When one of my turtles died, my brother and I buried it in my mother's rose bed to see if we could get an empty turtle shell, which would be quite a good thing to have. When we dug it up a few weeks later, there was almost nothing left - an outcome I had not anticipated, and one that left me with a strange, disturbed feeling. The earth was more fierce than I had guessed (p. 8)

Buddhism in its heart is an answer to our questions about suffering and loss, a response to the inexplicable; it is a way to live with life. Its explanations, its particular vocabulary and shorthand, its gentle pressures - they have been with me throughout my adult life; they are part of my language, my thought, my view. Buddhism saved my life and controlled it; it has been liberation and censure at once.

Buddhism is blunt about suffering, its causes and its cures. The Buddha taught that nothing is permanent. He taught this in a great many ways, but most of what he said came down to this: Things change. Change hurts; change cannot be avoided. "All compounded things are subject to dissolution" - this formula is basic Buddhist doctrine, it is pounded into us by the canon, by the masters, by our daily lives. It means all things are compounded and will dissolve, which means I am compounded and I will dissolve. This is not something I readily accept, and yet I am continually bombarded with the evidence. I longed to know this, this fact of life, this answer - that we are put together from other things and will be taken apart and build anew - that there is nothing known that escapes this fate. When one of his disciples struggled with lust or felt pride in his youth or strength, the Buddha recommended that the follower go to the charnel ground, and meditate on a corpse - on its blossoming into something new (pp. 13-14)

Tisdale's take on death serves as a near-perfect opener for this anthology issue, as the dualism of change/decay and of the first-person narrator's intense desire to explore/probe is balanced by the Buddhist beliefs the narrator attempts to practice. Many times in life, I have come into contact with people who seek detachment, but whose basic personalities are those of intense, driven, world-absorbed people. The inherent contradictions in this relate well with the seemingly paradoxical observation that death ceremonies serve the living and not the dead.

Another take on death that grabbed my attention was Michael Logan's "The Pressure Points." Told in a series of flashbacks involving the husband/narrator and his dying (then later dead) wife, who has breast cancer, Logan's tale reflects the anger, hatred, and irrational reactions that the spectre of Death can raise among the living and the dying.

Weeks not hungry punctuated by specific cravings for olives, chocolate, pistachio nuts, and pills - waiting for the death pregnancy test to register positive. Teen year erotic wet dreams discharged between clenched night teeth into amputation nightmares. Biology needed another host to continue. We had no children. The whole family should be dead. I am willing to go back several generations. I understand vampire stories now. (p. 351)

Logan's short story, with its rapid-fire changes in perspective and point of view, captures much of the confusion and frustration that comes from watching a disease like cancer conducting its slow, inexorable fatal march across the features of a loved one. It reminded me of my reactions at the age of 14, watching (before I finally turned away, three months before her death) my paternal grandmother die of stomach, lung, and liver cancer.

These are but two stellar stories in a collection that contains more very good stories than poor or average tales. In reading this anthology this past weekend, I recalled so many of the emotions that I felt over the years when friends and family died, or when I learned that a then-current or former student of mine had died in an accident. Coming to grips with these sorts of situations supposedly is a sign of maturation, of "growing up," even if so often we fail to grow towards a greater understanding of what is transpiring when a living body ceases to be alive. However, the tales contained in Conjunctions 51: The Death Issue touch upon so many of our nerve points that for any wanting to read thoughtful, challenging, and sometimes provocative tales on death and how it affects both the living and the dying (a separate entity with its own rules, or just part and parcel of the former? Such a question is addressed in several ways in this anthology.), this might be the anthology for them. Highly recommended.

Short Fiction Sunday: Álvaro Uribe and Olivia Sears's Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction

Whenever an anthology bears within its title "Best of," one might have a natural inclination to question whether or not the anthologist(s) really knows what s/he is talking about. Add to that title the name of the country of origin and the challenge becomes even more, as not does the anthology editor have to demonstrate cause for bestowing the label of "Best of" on a collection of works from a single country, but the reader almost has to be quite aware of the fiction being produced in the given country in order to be able to evaluate properly the breadth and depth of the editor(s)' chosen pieces. I was sent a review copy of Álvaro Uribe and Olivia Sear's forthcoming Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction bilingual anthology by another reviewer in large part due to my familiarity with very recent (post-2000) Latin American literature and my evaluation of this anthology will touch upon this awareness.

Uribe (Sears headed up the team of translators of these sixteen short stories) has certainly assembled a fine set of stories written by prominent Mexican short fiction writers born since the end of World War II. In his introduction, Uribe discusses the cosmopolitan nature of Mexican fiction, short and long alike, and how Spanish, French, and other Latin American writers have influenced the evolution of the Mexican short fiction. Interestingly (but not surprising, if one knows the complex history between these two nations), the United States is not cited (I will return to this at the end of this review). As a result of this tendency to look outside of Mexico's political boundaries for literary influences, these stories do not contain many uniting features, as Uribe notes:

Nothing unites them beyond the quality of their work and the essential, if not exactly literary, criteria of having produced their work, by happenstance or design, in the strain of Spanish common to the majority of Mexicans and of living or having lived in Mexico for most of their lives.

Uribe has ordered these stories in a reverse chronological order, beginning with "Lukin's Bed," written by Vivian Abenshushan (b. 1972) and concluding with Héctor Manjarrez's (b. 1945) "The End of the World." Uribe does this in order to take an inductive examination of Mexican short fiction, taking the reader from the more contemporary issues of Mexico's analogue to Generation X and stretching it back to the dawn of what would be the Boomer Generation in the United States. It is an interesting approach, one that allowed for some opportunity to show the diverse strains of Mexican fiction without the need to establish an artificial schema for evaluating these stories.

The stories themselves are almost uniformly strong. In particular, Ana García Bergua's "Los conservadores"/"The Preservers" struck me for its juxtapositioning of the Odd (a widow keeping her husband's embalmed corpse with her for years, dressing and undressing it according to the daily rhythms of the household) and the Mudane (the examination of the various relationships between the characters of aunt/nephew, nephew/girlfriend, girlfriend/corpse). Enrique Serna's "Tesoro viviente"/"Living Treasure" was a very subtle examination of motivation and temptation, with an ending that is all the more damning for how little things changed once the resident writer main character made her fateful decision.

While each of these stories are worthy of inclusion in "Best of"-style anthologies, I could not help but notice what was not included in this otherwise fine anthology. Where were the rising authors? Outside of Abenshushan and Álvaro Enrigue (b. 1969), there were no authors under the age of 40 included here; apparently this is an anthology for the truly-established authors. Strikingly, none of Mexico's Crack Manifesto members (Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Jorge Volpi) were included in this anthology and many of their works (especially those of Padilla and Volpi) have already begun to make their mark in international markets, including that of the United States. Perhaps it simply is a matter of their short fiction not being as well-known or regarded as their novels. However, Uribe's introduction fails to acknowledge them or the related South American McOndoist literary movement in his discussion of trends and authors that have influenced Mexican fiction, so perhaps it is something more.

Related to this is the question of how to evaluate the near-absence of Mexico's neighbor (and often antagonistic trading partner) the United States in these tales. While it certainly is true that Mexican writers drew their influences from Spain, France, and other parts of Latin America from the 19th century to the past twenty years before American culture became more influential in both Mexico and other regions of Latin America, one has to question whether or not these tales truly represent the most "contemporary" of Mexican attitudes, much less its fiction. This seeming lack of space devoted to addressing the issues and authors of "right now" however is but only a damper on what is otherwise an excellent, rich, diverse collection of stories that hopefully will inspire readers to dig deeper into Mexico's very rich literary tradition.

Publication Date: February 26, 2009 (US). Tradeback, Hardcover.

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press