SHORT STORIES
WHY VISIT AMERICA by Matthew Baker (Bloomsbury €18.95)
THERE’S a skew-whiff wonderfulness to the 13 tales in this off-kilter look at contemporary America and all its contradictions. Tackling hot-button topics, Baker tip-tilts the perspective, offering something at once strange yet instantly familiar.
In Rites, old people, surrounded by their families, invent ostentatious suicide rituals to avoid being a burden on resources — except for Uncle Orson, who conspicuously lives on, refusing to kill himself.
In Testimony Of Your Majesty, a rich girl is ostracised for her excessive shopping habits in a world where having less is the honoured option, while in Transition, a man’s decision to abandon his body and upload his consciousness to a computer is greeted with grief by his confused family. It’s all masterfully done, and Baker’s prose is engagingly easeful, yet hypnotically elegant.
YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN by Mary South (Picador €17.55)
THE ever-widening gap between unemotional technology and the all-too-messy griefs and insecurities of human beings are explored in this brilliantly biting debut.
Here, there are camps for recovering internet trolls, a warehouse packed with sedated, artificially grown men whose organs will be harvested, and ‘road kill architecture’ inspired by damaged bodies.
In Realtor To The Damned, a bereaved husband receives texts from his wife, his memories of her as fragile as ghosts. While in Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy, the restrained details of a surgical procedure are overwhelmed by a neuroscientist’s despair in the wake of her partner’s suicide.
The stories signpost the oncoming danger — in a world that is more ‘connected’ than ever, loneliness is still endemic, hearts break, and melancholy and rage win out over the cool disinterest of machines every time.
MANY PEOPLE DIE LIKE YOU by Lina Wolff, translated by Saskia Vogel (And Other Stories €18)
LINA WOLFF’S provocative, twisty debut, Bret Easton Ellis And The Other Dogs — in which stray dogs living at a brothel are named after male writers — was coolly irreverent, a deadpan poke at the phallocentric literary world.
Although some of that spiritedness is apparent in these 14 stories, the collection feels a little lacklustre in places.
Best of the bunch are the impassively hysterical No Man’s Land, a darkly funny tale of a private detective, a shadowed husband and a wife with a predilection for perfect grammar and a compromising need for retribution; and the odd, bleak Misery Porn, where an unemployed chef and a webcam star, who earns money from crying on camera, test the limits of their relationship as violence replaces weeping in their encounters.