Stephanie Ash’s The Annie Year (Unnamed Press, October 2016) has all the components of novels I like: strong, conflicted women, small town perils (lethargy, meth), youth that do things like ruin annual high school musicals.
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The truest physical expression of human empathy may well be to cringe: the grimace, the shoulders drawn to the ears, eyes narrowing or going shut. Cringing is an involuntary response to another’s humiliation or pain that reinforces compassionate connections with others.
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Something crucial to understanding the world of Kristine Ong Muslim’s collection Age of Blight is revealed in its wonderfully weird story “Zombie Sister.” Once clinically dead, the narrator’s sister, Beth, has returned to life, of some sort (the attending doctor is casual, commenting, “Every family has one”).
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In a pivotal scene in Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars (Burlesque Press, 2015), the ten-year-old narrator flips through a children’s illustrated guide to the Bible to find several pages stapled closed.
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Beth Gilstrap’s I Am Barbarella (Twelve Winters Press, 2015) opens with a Carson McCullers quote: “I am not meant to be alone, and without you, who understands.”
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The standards for near-and-post-apocalyptic Americana have risen, not least of which because the past two years have offered a surfeit of quality world’s end fiction with 2014’s bestselling Station Eleven and, this year, the more rarified In the Country of Ice Cream Star and Find Me available for pickup.
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