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Sinking, Singing
A young girl hears unsettling messages in the grooves of an old record album. A washed-up horror star gets a second chance at stardom, but at a great price. A robot rebellion is fueled by the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde.
In this collection of short fiction, some characters seek to escape (often through music or magic), while others choose to remain in the beautiful, albeit damaged, present moment.
In this collection of short fiction, some characters seek to escape (often through music or magic), while others choose to remain in the beautiful, albeit damaged, present moment.
104 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 15, 2024
1 person want to read
About the author
Gwynne Garfinkle
18 books11 followersGwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. Her debut novel, Can't Find My Way Home, is available from Aqueduct Press. Her collection of short fiction and poetry, People Change, was published in 2018 by Aqueduct. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Fantasy, Escape Pod, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Apex, Mermaids Monthly, The Deadlands, GigaNotoSaurus, Climbing Lightly Through Forests, Dreams & Nightmares, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Lackington's, and Not One of Us.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 20, 2025
It's 'Conversation Pieces' time again because Aqueduct Press keep knocking out excellent but slim volumes of feminist genre fiction. This time it's a short story collection from Gwynne Garfinkle, a poet and short story writer who's seen a previous collection in this series, 'People Change', which predates me receiving them for review. She also has a novel out, 'Can't Find My Way Home', also from Aqueduct Press.
It's an interesting collection, but one with an odd balance. The final story, the best and deepest of eleven, is forty pages long. The other ten take up sixty-six between them, so average under seven and peak at eleven. The shortest and least substantial, 'The Clockwork Cat's Escape' is a two page glimpse, certainly poignant but inherently fleeting. And most of these stories are glimpses, built on single ideas and spun out into something impressionistic. Only 'A Wild Patience' has the luxury of space to breathe and Garfinkle shines on that one.
It's a story of a town, really, where the men appear to win. I won't explain how because that way is fraught with spoilers but most of the husbands appear to be on their second wives and everything plays out like it's a picture postcard of the fifties. However, it's clearly the late seventies or maybe early eighties, because Jessica listens to punk bands. Why the discrepancy? Well, we find that out in the company of Gretchen, Jessica's younger sister, as she learns what's going on and where she can meet her real mum. Of course, this is feminist science fiction, so the men never win anything but a very weird temporary victory. It's only a happy story from a female perspective.
I like 'A Wild Patience' a lot. It's surely the best story here and certainly the only one we can truly get our teeth into, but that isn't to say that I didn't like the rest. Even that two-page glimpse of a story is worthwhile and many of the others have plenty to say too, if only in moments. Some, like ‘A Good Cast is Worth Repeating’, are merely small and perfectly formed. This wouldn't benefit from being any other length but eleven pages; but others felt to me like they could easily be bulked up into longer pieces that would give the author opportunity to ground them and deepen them. And, by longer, I don't mean novels, I mean longer short stories. The poet's drive to use one word when ten could suffice doesn't always help here.
One aspect that spoke to me personally is how most of them revolve about culture, starting with the opener, 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place’, about being true to yourself via a vinyl copy of 'The Best of the Animals' on vinyl. It's a highly engaging start, though I had to wonder if it could have been even more so if the story had unfolded in present tense. 'Emily and the What If Imp' ties to Emily's favourite book. 'Sinking, Singing' is about gigging bands, 'Resolution' about photos, 'The Discography of Theodore Grayson' about a vocalist and so on, with the other stories centered on plays, paintings and yet more live bands. This book is drenched in contemporary culture, typically in artefact form.
However, those artefacts aren't always the point and may never be. 'Emily and the What If Imp' is about mental illness, to the degree that we all share it, and functions as a coping mechanism of a story. 'Resolution' isn't really about Lois showing up in every photo taken of Tom, even though she wasn't there when they were snapped; it's about what we bring to what we see, like jealousy. 'The Discography of Theodore Grayson' is about whether we can ever separate art from the artists who create it. Grayson used to sound beautiful but now he sounds creepy, even in recordings, perhaps due to the allegations that were made that landed him in court? It's a fair continuation of theme from 'Resolution', but one that society might see in the opposite way.
I found enjoyment in all of these, to varying degrees, not least because I'm an archivist of cultural artefacts and it was wonderful to read so many stories that involve them. Many got me thinking, which is the positive flipside of so many of these being glimpses, but it was 'Beyond and Back,' six stories in, that truly stirred my mind. It's about temporary time machine technology that's used to go see live bands that presumably aren't around anymore. The protagonist starts out in 2050 but watches a punk band perform in 1980. I've long had my own list of bands to see live at very specific moments in time, if anyone ever lends me a time machine. I'm also building out the framework for a collection of my own I spawned from a similar idea that also revolves around cultural artefacts.
With acknowledgement of 'The Two Mrs. Mansfields', a 'Night Gallery'-esque look at a couple of wives, and 'Sinking, Singing', about how a band called the Untimely Ripped are untimely broken up by a group of singers who surely can't ever be accused of violating advertising standards laws, both of them very capable stories, my favourite here has to be 'A Good Cast is Worth Repeating'.
It's about Bela Lugosi, the actor who brought life to Count Dracula, initially on stage and then in the pivotal Universal precode horror movie in 1931. He confesses to a child in a small town diner that he regrets not taking the role of the Monster that same year in 'Frankenstein', even though it’s an oversimplification of the truth behind that movie. That kid turns out to be an imp who shows him what life would have been like had he made a different decision. It's tastefully done, given that it revolves around real life characters, becoming a perfectly formed short story.
While I liked this collection from the standpoint of a reader, I also liked it from the standpoint of a writer, a critic and an archivist. It's exactly the sort of book I ought to gravitate to, which tells me that I ought to dive into Gwynne Garfinkle's other work, especially her novel, 'Can't Find My Way Home', whose synopsis reads to me like a movie in a completely different genre. I wonder if that would hold true after I read it. In other words, this is yet another win for Aqueduct Press, which is yet another introduction to an author to watch.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in October 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Books...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
It's an interesting collection, but one with an odd balance. The final story, the best and deepest of eleven, is forty pages long. The other ten take up sixty-six between them, so average under seven and peak at eleven. The shortest and least substantial, 'The Clockwork Cat's Escape' is a two page glimpse, certainly poignant but inherently fleeting. And most of these stories are glimpses, built on single ideas and spun out into something impressionistic. Only 'A Wild Patience' has the luxury of space to breathe and Garfinkle shines on that one.
It's a story of a town, really, where the men appear to win. I won't explain how because that way is fraught with spoilers but most of the husbands appear to be on their second wives and everything plays out like it's a picture postcard of the fifties. However, it's clearly the late seventies or maybe early eighties, because Jessica listens to punk bands. Why the discrepancy? Well, we find that out in the company of Gretchen, Jessica's younger sister, as she learns what's going on and where she can meet her real mum. Of course, this is feminist science fiction, so the men never win anything but a very weird temporary victory. It's only a happy story from a female perspective.
I like 'A Wild Patience' a lot. It's surely the best story here and certainly the only one we can truly get our teeth into, but that isn't to say that I didn't like the rest. Even that two-page glimpse of a story is worthwhile and many of the others have plenty to say too, if only in moments. Some, like ‘A Good Cast is Worth Repeating’, are merely small and perfectly formed. This wouldn't benefit from being any other length but eleven pages; but others felt to me like they could easily be bulked up into longer pieces that would give the author opportunity to ground them and deepen them. And, by longer, I don't mean novels, I mean longer short stories. The poet's drive to use one word when ten could suffice doesn't always help here.
One aspect that spoke to me personally is how most of them revolve about culture, starting with the opener, 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place’, about being true to yourself via a vinyl copy of 'The Best of the Animals' on vinyl. It's a highly engaging start, though I had to wonder if it could have been even more so if the story had unfolded in present tense. 'Emily and the What If Imp' ties to Emily's favourite book. 'Sinking, Singing' is about gigging bands, 'Resolution' about photos, 'The Discography of Theodore Grayson' about a vocalist and so on, with the other stories centered on plays, paintings and yet more live bands. This book is drenched in contemporary culture, typically in artefact form.
However, those artefacts aren't always the point and may never be. 'Emily and the What If Imp' is about mental illness, to the degree that we all share it, and functions as a coping mechanism of a story. 'Resolution' isn't really about Lois showing up in every photo taken of Tom, even though she wasn't there when they were snapped; it's about what we bring to what we see, like jealousy. 'The Discography of Theodore Grayson' is about whether we can ever separate art from the artists who create it. Grayson used to sound beautiful but now he sounds creepy, even in recordings, perhaps due to the allegations that were made that landed him in court? It's a fair continuation of theme from 'Resolution', but one that society might see in the opposite way.
I found enjoyment in all of these, to varying degrees, not least because I'm an archivist of cultural artefacts and it was wonderful to read so many stories that involve them. Many got me thinking, which is the positive flipside of so many of these being glimpses, but it was 'Beyond and Back,' six stories in, that truly stirred my mind. It's about temporary time machine technology that's used to go see live bands that presumably aren't around anymore. The protagonist starts out in 2050 but watches a punk band perform in 1980. I've long had my own list of bands to see live at very specific moments in time, if anyone ever lends me a time machine. I'm also building out the framework for a collection of my own I spawned from a similar idea that also revolves around cultural artefacts.
With acknowledgement of 'The Two Mrs. Mansfields', a 'Night Gallery'-esque look at a couple of wives, and 'Sinking, Singing', about how a band called the Untimely Ripped are untimely broken up by a group of singers who surely can't ever be accused of violating advertising standards laws, both of them very capable stories, my favourite here has to be 'A Good Cast is Worth Repeating'.
It's about Bela Lugosi, the actor who brought life to Count Dracula, initially on stage and then in the pivotal Universal precode horror movie in 1931. He confesses to a child in a small town diner that he regrets not taking the role of the Monster that same year in 'Frankenstein', even though it’s an oversimplification of the truth behind that movie. That kid turns out to be an imp who shows him what life would have been like had he made a different decision. It's tastefully done, given that it revolves around real life characters, becoming a perfectly formed short story.
While I liked this collection from the standpoint of a reader, I also liked it from the standpoint of a writer, a critic and an archivist. It's exactly the sort of book I ought to gravitate to, which tells me that I ought to dive into Gwynne Garfinkle's other work, especially her novel, 'Can't Find My Way Home', whose synopsis reads to me like a movie in a completely different genre. I wonder if that would hold true after I read it. In other words, this is yet another win for Aqueduct Press, which is yet another introduction to an author to watch.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in October 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Books...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
Displaying 1 of 1 review