Morgan Talty’s debut collection of short stories, Night of the Living Rez, is a biting exploration of life on the Penobscot reservation. My admiration for the book wholeheartedly subscribes to the spirit of visibility and uniqueness as we’re seeing more Indigenous writers and books enter the mainstream cultural consciousness.
The aesthetic significance of these stories—which is to say, Talty’s technique, spare style, and intermingling of themes and variations of the wounded and difficult lives of his Penobscot characters—serves as an important glimpse into the landscape of literary fiction involving a resilient Indigenous people. I found myself moved by their lives and how well Talty is able to capture a wide range of emotions. While the stories are tragic, sad, and at times even humorous, they are perhaps best described by the title of the final story, “The Name Means Thunder.” Their unpredictability, like a thunderstorm, is what makes them extraordinary.
One of the things I love about this collection is the way you balance humor with sadness, which is difficult to do well. Can you talk a little about the importance of sadness and humor in the book and how you approach the process of finding that balance?
この記事は Poets & Writers Magazine の July - August 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は Poets & Writers Magazine の July - August 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
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AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
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TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
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IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
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