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The Trouble with Language: Stories
Weaving together fabulist invention and gritty realism, Rebecca Fishow's debut collection, The Trouble with Language, unearths stories of men and women whose traumatic experiences make way for dazzlingly cerebral lives. A young man finds a severed head at his door years after his mother takes her own life. A married couple initiates a bloody jailbreak. A young woman poses nude for strangers in attempts to pay for mental health treatment, while another finds herself rapidly shrinking in a hotel room. No two of these surprising and playful fictions are alike, and each encourages us to peek behind life's curtains to discover more bizarre, enchanting, and joyful truths.
188 pages, ebook
First published November 24, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 19, 2020
The Trouble with Language is an uncanny and magnetic collection of stories. Rebecca Fishow blends the mundane with the macabre to fantastic effect. Her voice is wholly original, at once mysterious and matter-of-fact. These stories are dark celebrations of the disembodied, the maimed, the starved, and the reclaimed parts of the self. The endings are so masterful they will leave you thinking long after you’ve turned the page.
February 18, 2021
This haunting, surreal, at times startling, often very funny collection of short stories is an impressive debut from Rebecca Fishow. The author's use of dreamlike, sometimes disturbing imagery mixed with realistic scenes of humdrum daily life creates a thought-provoking and arresting contrast. The emotional range and depth of Fishow's writing make this book difficult to forget. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and will definitely revisit it over time; it's the kind of collection that bears multiple readings.
January 27, 2021
I found this collection of short stories thought provoking and captivating. The writing style at several points reminded me of Sylvia Plath. A brilliant collection I would recommend to anyone.
February 18, 2021
This collection is astounding for the way it entertains, illuminates, challenges, and comforts—oftentimes all in the span of a single strange yet beautiful story. "The Trouble with Language" is more than worth the price of admission for the incredible pieces of flash fiction, but what Fishow does in the longer pieces make this a standout collection showcasing the author's immeasurable talent and range.
August 5, 2025
The Trouble With Language (2020) is the first book by Rebecca Fishow; I read her second book first, How to Love a Blackhole (2025) and though I like that even better, I think both books are great. Both include mostly short shorts/flash fiction, and though Language is 177 pages, it is like Blackhole, a little book, including 30 stories. I have copious notes here but will try to condense/choose judiciously.
My over all assessment is that I am thrilled with the high quality of this effort. The work features (mostly) women narrators or mcs that are in or are recovering from trauma from some kind of distress. Increasingly I thought it was a book that, without mentioning any contemporary sociopolitical facts, is very much about the present moment, this particular age of anxiety. And language. Often darkly humorous, lyrical, even poetic writing, runs through it all, but mental health is almost always present. Anxiety/dissociation, disconnection, isolation. Sleep disorders, relationship struggles/distance with some unnamed “husband” or lover. Violence of various kinds happen--including assault.
There’s a thread of caring/vulnerability, too, so anger is a less common emotion than this sense of inward-directed psychological trouble. In many stories, there’s mention of the mcn“shrinking” into oneself as a kind of erasure (I thought of a children’s book, The Shrinking of Treehorn, no disrespect to either author). So I think psychologically and maybe also writerly we are in Jean Rhys, Amelia Gray, Anna Kavan territory, some strength pulsing through what might in any other hands seem like fragility--sometimes schizophrenic, sometimes just generalized “madness,” or the edge of it; let’s call it emotional precarity. Madwomen in the attic seen and heard here!
Sometimes, especialy later in this volume we find formal experiments with the irreal, with a focus on language; for instance, an epistolary “story”--extended prose poem?--of letters R. sends to herself. But they aren’t so much deeply reflective psychological portraits as character studies painted in irrealist language.
In the title story, two very short pages, a woman observes that her mother can’t get it together to order something in a store. Most people are impatient and angry for the delay. “It seemed to me the trouble was not my mother’s language but the women’s lack of compassion." This to me in this central story might be at the heart of the project, sort of a point-blank, not irreal (0k, realist, sorry) statement of one Problem in the world that the stories often address, which you might forget (or is disguised) within the context of all the formal experimentation and lyrical play (which is dazzling at times).
*In one story, Something to Do, Someone to Love, a woman just graduated college and she is like J.D. Salinger’s Zooey, she’s stuck, she graduated with honors, so she poses nude for money, ha? But scratch just beneath the surface, not all that funny? Her Dad says that there are two things you need to live a healthy life: Have something to do, and someone to love. She’s in that space between, post college.
Sometimes the stories are weirdly hilarious, as in “The Cyclops Has Its Reasons,” (humorous fantasy/myth violence?), but then there is "A Lesson in Etiquette," which features some more disturbing realist violence.
Maybe the title of the story “The Opposite of Entropy” provides a key to central themes. But I like these stories very much and recommend you check one of these books out.
My over all assessment is that I am thrilled with the high quality of this effort. The work features (mostly) women narrators or mcs that are in or are recovering from trauma from some kind of distress. Increasingly I thought it was a book that, without mentioning any contemporary sociopolitical facts, is very much about the present moment, this particular age of anxiety. And language. Often darkly humorous, lyrical, even poetic writing, runs through it all, but mental health is almost always present. Anxiety/dissociation, disconnection, isolation. Sleep disorders, relationship struggles/distance with some unnamed “husband” or lover. Violence of various kinds happen--including assault.
There’s a thread of caring/vulnerability, too, so anger is a less common emotion than this sense of inward-directed psychological trouble. In many stories, there’s mention of the mcn“shrinking” into oneself as a kind of erasure (I thought of a children’s book, The Shrinking of Treehorn, no disrespect to either author). So I think psychologically and maybe also writerly we are in Jean Rhys, Amelia Gray, Anna Kavan territory, some strength pulsing through what might in any other hands seem like fragility--sometimes schizophrenic, sometimes just generalized “madness,” or the edge of it; let’s call it emotional precarity. Madwomen in the attic seen and heard here!
Sometimes, especialy later in this volume we find formal experiments with the irreal, with a focus on language; for instance, an epistolary “story”--extended prose poem?--of letters R. sends to herself. But they aren’t so much deeply reflective psychological portraits as character studies painted in irrealist language.
In the title story, two very short pages, a woman observes that her mother can’t get it together to order something in a store. Most people are impatient and angry for the delay. “It seemed to me the trouble was not my mother’s language but the women’s lack of compassion." This to me in this central story might be at the heart of the project, sort of a point-blank, not irreal (0k, realist, sorry) statement of one Problem in the world that the stories often address, which you might forget (or is disguised) within the context of all the formal experimentation and lyrical play (which is dazzling at times).
*In one story, Something to Do, Someone to Love, a woman just graduated college and she is like J.D. Salinger’s Zooey, she’s stuck, she graduated with honors, so she poses nude for money, ha? But scratch just beneath the surface, not all that funny? Her Dad says that there are two things you need to live a healthy life: Have something to do, and someone to love. She’s in that space between, post college.
Sometimes the stories are weirdly hilarious, as in “The Cyclops Has Its Reasons,” (humorous fantasy/myth violence?), but then there is "A Lesson in Etiquette," which features some more disturbing realist violence.
Maybe the title of the story “The Opposite of Entropy” provides a key to central themes. But I like these stories very much and recommend you check one of these books out.
August 13, 2021
Surreal, macabre, and often hauntingly realistic, this collection of short stories astounded me with its formal inventiveness and creative approaches to moments of trauma, disembodiment, and powerlessness. Whether it is the clippy, sharp sentences in "Timothy's Severed Head" or the lyrical prose in "Fifteen Days and Fifteen Nights," Fishow is a wonderfully strange and elegant writer who I will continue to follow. An exciting new voice.
April 5, 2021
Odd stories and strange ideas, but I couldn’t put it down. I found myself re-reading some of the stories finding new interesting tidbits.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews