Grace’s Reviews > Collected Stories > Status Update

Various Miracles is written so intoxicatingly, as a train that pulls you along so suddenly & effortlessly you find yourself at the end. It is amazing craft in league with Italo Calvino. Much like Calvino too, one is left with the sense of a pleasurable delicacy eaten but not of any nourishment or particular insight into the human condition. I love the richness of her vocabulary.

Segue, her last story, is written with such detail & initimacy you cannot help believing she is writing about herself. There must be some inventions - the character’s insistance on grammar as a sonnet writer is so against (in my mind) beauty in prose that she cannot in fact be a very good sonnet writer. & further, I am reminded how happy marriages rarely inspire interesting writing.