Verge

November 15, 2019
Characters from the fringes of society grapple with desire and fury in this collection of short stories. Early on in "The Pull," a story about a young swimmer from a war-torn country, the narrator describes her childhood as the "kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen." The stories here are exactly that kind: insistently visceral, pushing into, and past, the reader's comfort zone. Many of the stories center erotic experiences. In "The Garden of Earthly Delights," Bosch works in a modern-day fish processing plant, and he finds boundless pleasure in the arms of a young male co-worker. In "Cusp," a teenage girl smuggles drugs into a local prison and shares her body with the prisoners as a way of being closer to her incarcerated brother. But if these stories teach us about lust, they also flip to the other side of that same coin: These are narratives full of deep rage. Some of this rage takes place inside of intimate relationships, as in "A Woman Signifying," in which the protagonist deliberately burns her face against a radiator to create a "symbol" of her anger at her lover. Sometimes this rage is social, as in "Drive Through," about an encounter with a panhandler at a McDonald's drive-thru. Yuknavitch (The Misfit's Manifesto, 2017, etc.) keeps readers' heads pressed against what is hardest to see, and this doesn't always land. Some of the rage can feel self-righteous; some of the desire pushes deep into taboo and veers toward unpalatable. But where there are risks, there are rewards, and these howls from the throats of women, queer characters, the impoverished, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity. Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.

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Starred review from December 9, 2019
In this brilliant collection, Yuknavitch (The Book of Joan) chronicles people outside society’s margins. In “Cusp,” a teenager in rural Texas comes of age while acting as a drug mule at a prison. “The Organ Runner” follows a young girl as she works to ferry kidneys for illegal backroom transplants, while “Second Language” deals with sex trafficking in Portland, Ore. In “A Woman Refusing,” a frustrated ex-husband refuses to aid his former spouse, who stands nude atop a high-rise, threatening to jump. The incest-tinged “Second Coming” describes an at-home artificial insemination involving a sexually naive woman and her married sister. In “Mechanics,” a woman flirts with a potential new lover while working under the hood of her car. The stories are consistently incisive, with sharp sentences and a barreling pace. The subject matter is pretty dark stuff, but Yuknavitch does offer an occasional ray of hope or rallying cry of resilience for her characters trapped by addiction, forced sex work, or bad marriages. This riveting collection invites readers to see women whose points of view are typically ignored. Agent: Rayhané Sanders.

Starred review from January 1, 2020
Yuknavitch's (The Book of Joan, 2017) collection of strange, provocative stories is about bodies at their most transgressive, and what they mean in the world. Many tales have a surrealist bent. In Second Language, a young girl trapped in sex trafficking tells stories to the other children of the graywolves who come to help those who deserve it; in Cosmos, a planetarium janitor builds cities out of the detritus that teens leave behind. Partners and lovers make poor decisions through their rage, punishing or dooming themselves in the process; people become desperate in the grips of physical passion they can't understand. Yuknavitch's tales are often horror stories, but even as she writes of captivity, of grief, and of tortured relationships with the body, she writes primarily of healing and endurance: once-junkies now sober, a man adapting to life both without an eye and without his husband, a boxer fighting to recover after a stroke, a refugee and expert swimmer getting a glimpse of the shore. In Verge, characters find their meaning and faith in their own bodies, grounded in physicality and anatomy, pain and desire. These stories are daring, provoking, and incendiary.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2020

Author of the best-booked, grab-your-throat The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children and a finalist for the 2017 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, Yuknavitch offers her first story collection. Here, a traumatized eight-year-old ferries frozen organs throughout Eastern Europe, a bullied child brilliantly tells off a bunch of schoolyard victimizers, and a young janitor builds a miniature city from found objects until he makes a shocking discovery. Prepare for your own shocking discoveries; can't wait.

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