Animal Person

November 1, 2021

After debuting with the multi-award-finalist Godshot, Bieker returns with stories of Heartbroke characters whose loves and losses unfold in California's sunstruck Central Valley. Former Wallace Stegner Fellow Folk debuts with a collection of absurdist stories, including Out There, a piece published in The New Yorker about a woman whose attempts to use a dating app are disrupted by incredibly handsome yet artificial men deployed by Russian hackers. Acquired in a two-book deal that includes his debut novel, NYU Starworks fellow Friedlander's The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land is set in Israel and the Middle East and features outsiders who must contend with past sorrow or future uncertainty. A second collection after Light Lifting, which was short-listed for Giller, Commonwealth, and Frank O'Connor honors, MacLeod's Animal Person explores those moments when one's life is about to change (25,000-copy first printing). From poet Mirosevich, also author of the award-winning nonfiction Pink Harvest, Spell Heaven offers linked stories about a lesbian couple finding happiness in a coastal town. From Newman, whose memoir Still Points North was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle's John Leonard Prize, Nobody Gets Out Alive highlights women struggling to get by in rugged Alaska (50,000-copy first printing). Witchcraft, blue jaguars, and a California rainforest-set novella starring Maria, Maria and possibly more Marias all feature in this mystical debut from former PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow Rubio.

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February 1, 2022
Meticulous prose and unpredictable characters collide in these short stories. When telling tales that abound with changing fortunes, personal dynamics, and unspoken mysteries, it helps to know how to set things in motion. MacLeod's collection features eight stories total, nearly all of which feature a compelling opening sentence. It's hard to resist a beginning like "I am not like other people. And, most probably, I am not at all like you," or "This is about me and my sister. Or is it my sister and I, or my sister and me?" MacLeod's stories abound with characters dealing with delicate situations, from the narrator of "Lagomorph," who's contending with an elderly rabbit, to the characters struggling to play a familiar piece of music in "The Entertainer." These are stories where precision and specificity are both crucial. "The Closing Date" recounts a murder from a vantage point some years later, and its narrator--whose family was staying in a motel room next door to the killer--moves back and forth in time, chronicling the events leading up to the crime as well as the effects it had on him and his wife. It's the precision found in that story, and the way it moves between past and future, that best shows what this collection can do. The peculiar narration of "What Exactly Do You Think You're Looking At?"--whose protagonist observes that "the things that attract other people do not attract me"--also offers a memorably askew perspective on the world, as does the phantasmagorical ending to the otherwise realistic "The Ninth Concession." The payoffs don't always click, but when they do, the precision is a thing to behold. MacLeod's second collection abounds with crystallized moments in time.

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Starred review from February 21, 2022
Macleod (Light Lifting) returns with a brilliant collection mainly set in Canada, bringing spot-on characterizations to his protagonists as they navigate tumultuous changes. “Lagomorph” examines a family’s evolving relationship with their pet rabbit, Gunther. Narrator David and his wife Sarah amicably separate after their three children are grown, leaving him alone with Gunther and reflecting on how the rabbit’s presence in their lives had faded but now is prominent. In “The Dead Want,” a 20-year-old college student named Joe makes the long drive back to his father’s remote hometown in Nova Scotia for the funeral of his cousin Beatrice. Along the way, passing through Toronto and then Montreal to pick up a relative, Joe reflects on the different paths they took, despite being close as children, born six weeks apart. A new mother named Amy in “Once Removed” is reluctant to visit her boyfriend’s demanding great-aunt Greet, who lives alone in a retirement community and wants to meet the baby. The trek requires a series of bus transfers across Montreal on a 90º day, plus Amy has a sneaking suspicion that Greet has ulterior motives. Throughout, Macleod offers piercing insights into how his characters see themselves in relation to their families. This is a winner.

March 1, 2022
MacLeod's engrossing short story collection follows characters navigating the transient shallows of their lives. Relationships strain, connections to others shift, and inner desires and resentments are exposed. In the haunting "The Closing Date," a young family books a motel room for a brief stay prior to moving into their permanent home. As the heat index and trepidations rise, another guest comes to the rescue, later revealing a menacing secret hidden behind closed doors. In "Lagomorph," a husband is left to care for his family's pet rabbit as he considers his notions of family as his fracturing marriage begins to involve separate living arrangements if not yet completely separate lives. In the memorable "Once Removed," Amy begrudgingly accompanies her boyfriend, Matt, with their infant in tow, across the city for a visit with Matt's elderly relative, a weekend lunch that ends up revealing telling aspects of unexpectedly intersecting lives. Populated by family and acquaintances of all stripes, MacLeod's sly tales find characters reconsidering present assumptions and the unknown expanses of their own futures and those of the worlds they inhabit.

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