Status Updates From The Anchor Book of New Amer...

Idk it's fine

Letters to Wendy's by Joe Wenderoth - This is exactly the kind of clever that I hate. Pithy comment cards. I had no idea what it was and was just confused and unamused until I Googled, not I am annoyed and unamused. 1 star

Scarlotti and the Sinkhole by Padget Powell - Funny, absurd, sad, really gross. An entertaining slice of drunken, horny, injured Florida redneck life. 4-stars

Up the Old Goat Road by Dawn Raffel
I rarely like microfiction, and I don't like it here. I don't know why I read this, and am not nearly invested enough to care. 1.5 stars.

Short Talks by Anne Carson. Brilliant glorious prose poems. 5-stars

"On Hedonism: Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls."

The Sound Gun by Matthew Darby. I try to judge a book at least partly on whether I think the author achieved what he set out to do. I think Darby did that. I hated the pretentious heavy-handed approach and can name a dozen other pieces, stories and novels, that I think told essentially the same story to the same end and did it much better, and which I definitely got more from. He ain't no Vonnegut. 2-stars

Where I work by Ann Cummins. It was a strong character sketch I guess, but a few pages of reaching across education and class divide to experience a poor uneducated (possibly developmentally delayed) young woman's failure and oddness is not really enough for me. 2-stars.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

This was not my first time reading this story, and every time I do I am gobsmacked. DFW would have been so much happier if his mind ever stopped. Simultaneously the most uproariously funny and guttingly sad story about sexual release and its difficulty in a world filled with paradox that has ever been written. 5 stars.

Down the Road by Stephen Dixon. I just realized I never put in a comment or star rating for this which I read several days ago. I thought it was an interesting exercise, We sort of tunnel inside the head of this man who is having a moment where he has to choose his own survival over that of another. I didn't love it but it was well done. 3/5 stars.

Someone to Talk To by Deborah Eisenberg: Art and commerce and love and ethics cannot mix. The secret to a happy life is to get a bit lucky and stay where luck placed you and to not feel things. The secret to art is to experience the world fully and feel everything. Impossible. 5-stars.

Tiny Smiling Daddy by Mary Gaitskill - I love Mary Gaitskill's work and this was no exception. We see an old Midwestern man so contained by his anger and relentless need for control that he shuts out the world, including his daughter whose lesbianism he treats as a personal attack. When she writes an article about their relationship he has to fight to compartmentalize and redirect fault. Heartbreaking. 5-stars

Two Brothers by Brian Evenson - This is the perfect iteration of what it is trying to be. It is repulsive, horrifying, disgusting, soul-killing, but perfect. I never ever want to read it again. 5-stars.

X Number of Possibilities by Joanna Scott. In some ways the most straightforward story in this anthology, but I don't think I understood it. I think that the message is that we invent ourselves and the biggest threat to contentment (and also the greatest possibility for salvation) is others seeing inside us (by x-ray, empathy, or ESP.) We need to fend off that which glimpses insider to keep things placid, 3 stars

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri

I cried. I never cry. A story of being an Indian American immediately after the Partition. The MCs Indian family befriends a Bengali scholar whose wife and 7 daughters are in what is now Bangladesh during the tensions and eventual war. There were no means of communication. Mr. Pirzada's grace and fear and the MCs pure heart moved me profoundly. Unambiguously 5-stars

You Drive by Christine Schutt. Revolting, horrifying, unbelievably effective. Awed by the craft, and never want to read this again. What incest and sexual assault will do to a person. Abnegnation of self. 5-stars

Histories of the Undead by Kate Braverman
Enveloping and haunting, We ride along as a woman comes apart, finding herself in a fugue where she immerses herself in the lives of others (some she doesn't even know) to escape from actual life, work, husband, child, and speaks of inanities (including others lives) rather than death or decay or joylessness. Moving and thought-provoking in an insistent way. 4.5 stars

People Shouldn't Have to be the Ones Who Tell You by Gary Lutz

I really hated this. The exemplar, the dictionary definition, of pretentious writing. "The arc of his piss was at least the suggestion of a path that thoughts could later take." "The two of them came by together one night, alike in the sherbety tint to their lips and the violescent quickening to their eyelids." 1-star

The Paperhanger by William Gay. A beautifully written tragedy filled with malevolence and collapse. 5-stars

The Life and Work of Alphonse Cauders by Alexander Hemon. I had already read this, in the excellent collection The Question of Bruno. Hemon is a Bosnian now in America, and the brutality and absurdities of living under strongman rule are at the center of his work. This is a sort of anti-hagiography of a Zelig type character followed by historical notes. Odd is an understatement, so is brilliant. 5-stars.

The Father's Blessing by Mary Caponegro. Well, that ended up being unsettling after being unpleasantly ridiculous for the most part. This tale of a demented, disconnected, incompetent, self-congratulatory priest has some humor I suppose, but it is an effortful humor, and the many prettily crafted passages are effortful too. It never worked for me, the end was creepy AF to no end, but an A for effort. 2-stars.

The Old Dictionary by Lydia Davis - Well that was great! I think it did what Ducks, Newberryport did in a few pages rather than 100. 5-stars.

I'm Slavering by Sam Lipsyte. I love Lipsyte's gritty writing, but sometimes it's like fine sandpaper and sometimes like a mouthful of clams not properly washed. I am pretty sure that is intentional. This story about the addicts, the mentally ill, the dysfunctional (not mutually exclusive categories) who follow each other off the cliff feels true, It's beautifully crafted, and also often not enjoyable. A 4?

The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr -- Doerr's writing is, as ever, vivid and transporting. Most stories cover isolated moments, but this sprawls over the arc of life from a good mother's love, to surviving genocide by making choices when every choice is inhuman, to the time after when we live with the former. It is ambitious and impressive, but I also think it would have been far better as a book. 3.5 stars

The Girl With the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender

I am not often a fan of the surreal, and the metaphor of an infirm father making his daughter/caretaker wear a backpack made of stone at all times is a little too on the nose for me. There are some brilliant lines though. It is just a few pages so worth a look for those who enjoy this stripped-down approach to storytelling.

3 stars

Gentleman's Agreement by Mark Richards.
This did not pull me in, and it felt too wide ranging for such a short story. Things were missing I thought were needed to connect the broken windshield that started the story and the macabre scene in the shed that ended it. I am also on record as not liking things written a child's eye perspective, and though written in 3rd person this qualifies.

2.5 stars

Do Not Disturb by AM Homes. Oh yes! Marriage can be worse than cancer. I loved this! 5 stars

Everything Ravaged Everything Burned.by Wells Tower.
At the sentence level this is exquisite. It is clever, funny (in a New Yorker sort of way, not a laugh-out-loud way), brutal and a very disturbing look at adulting, but for Vikings. It made me think of the Tom Waits line"

Well Frank settled down in the Valley
And he hung his wild years
On a nail that he drove through
His wife's forehead

4.5