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Two reviews
Jul. 17th, 2005 05:25 pmI read two wonderful stories this past week, which I’m going to review here as teasers for the books in which they were published. One story is “Ignition,” from I-O, by Simon Logan; the other is “The Other Grace,” from In the Palace of Repose, by Holly Phillips. Both collections were published by Prime Books .
The opening scene of “Ignition” is creepy/scary in the matter-of-fact way the narrator contemplates his own imminent self-immolation. He finds a degree of meaning as a walking explosive for an anarchist named Shiva, who also plays a prominent role in Logan’s brilliant, yet-to-be-published novel Pretty Little Things to Fill Up the Void. The setting of Logan’s novel, as well as recent stories like “Ignition,” is a bleak near-future dystopia, which he seeds with fascinating little anachronisms, like (in Pretty Little Things) an apartment full of VCRs. Just as important, Logan’s characters are real people trying to deal with their brutally stunted prospects as best they can, sometimes through risk-taking, sometimes through violence, sometimes through relationships whether dysfunctional or touching or both, but always in ways that make the reader care. I suspect I’ll have more to say about Pretty Little Things to Fill Up the Void once it gets closer to publication.
In “The Other Grace,” Holly Phillips tells the story of a young woman who has lost her memory and endures the radical alienation of going “home,” where she finds her family trying to get their own, the “other” Grace back through what they see as acts of kindness. This is an extraordinary study of “otherness” that I wish I could have published in my magazine.
Work life: My latest publishing credit is a paper I helped one of our PhD students (Kalahn) write. It’s based on a series of questions we asked in a smallpox poll in late 2002:
Kalahn Taylor-Clark et al., “Confidence in Crisis? Understanding Trust in Government and Public Attitudes Toward Mandatory State Health Powers.” Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, 2005, 3(2):138-147.
Is that a cool journal name, or what? But the one I really want to get into soon is Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases. That’s a c.v entry to die for. Hey, it’s not as though I’m likely to get published in Realms of Fantasy. I’ll leave that up to you folks.
Aside: I hope everyone will be patient while I try to find a voice for this space. I stumbled into having an LJ without having a plan, so I’ll be groping for a while.
The opening scene of “Ignition” is creepy/scary in the matter-of-fact way the narrator contemplates his own imminent self-immolation. He finds a degree of meaning as a walking explosive for an anarchist named Shiva, who also plays a prominent role in Logan’s brilliant, yet-to-be-published novel Pretty Little Things to Fill Up the Void. The setting of Logan’s novel, as well as recent stories like “Ignition,” is a bleak near-future dystopia, which he seeds with fascinating little anachronisms, like (in Pretty Little Things) an apartment full of VCRs. Just as important, Logan’s characters are real people trying to deal with their brutally stunted prospects as best they can, sometimes through risk-taking, sometimes through violence, sometimes through relationships whether dysfunctional or touching or both, but always in ways that make the reader care. I suspect I’ll have more to say about Pretty Little Things to Fill Up the Void once it gets closer to publication.
In “The Other Grace,” Holly Phillips tells the story of a young woman who has lost her memory and endures the radical alienation of going “home,” where she finds her family trying to get their own, the “other” Grace back through what they see as acts of kindness. This is an extraordinary study of “otherness” that I wish I could have published in my magazine.
Work life: My latest publishing credit is a paper I helped one of our PhD students (Kalahn) write. It’s based on a series of questions we asked in a smallpox poll in late 2002:
Kalahn Taylor-Clark et al., “Confidence in Crisis? Understanding Trust in Government and Public Attitudes Toward Mandatory State Health Powers.” Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, 2005, 3(2):138-147.
Is that a cool journal name, or what? But the one I really want to get into soon is Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases. That’s a c.v entry to die for. Hey, it’s not as though I’m likely to get published in Realms of Fantasy. I’ll leave that up to you folks.
Aside: I hope everyone will be patient while I try to find a voice for this space. I stumbled into having an LJ without having a plan, so I’ll be groping for a while.
