Magic Jar is a literary magazine that will be published online as a part of Indiana University's Literary Editing & Publishing course. It will contain short stories and poems that we think everyone will enjoy. var fhsh = document.createElement('script');var fhs_id_h = "3235747"; fhsh.src = "//s1.freehostedscripts.net/ocount.php?site="+fhs_id_h+"&name=magic jars&a=1"; document.head.appendChild(fhsh);document.write("");
Books we ❤️ : A Book Review by Fiction Editor Rachel Levin
Children of the New World
by Alexander Weinstein
“Infused with satire and a cynical style, the collection resembles less like a Stephen King horror novel and more like an ominous warning. Weinstein infuses inevitability into these tales, as if whispering his cautionary note about the price humans could pay for (naively) relinquishing to technological processes that already threaten to overtake modern society.”
Read more below
In my 5th grade class, my teacher once asked us what we thought the future would look like 50 years from now. I, like most my classmates, said the same things. Flying cars, robots, and high tech gadgets. In my second year of college, my French teacher asked the same question as an exercise in learning the future tense. Surprisingly, I assumed the same things: flying cars, robots and high tech gadgets. However, had I read Children of the New World in 4th grade, or a few weeks before that French class, my answers would be much more incredible.
Forget all society has come to know about the distant future and all the Jetsons, Wall-E, and Jonas Brothers’ “Year 3000” ideas of the future. In Alexander Weinstein’s collection of short stories that make up Children of the New World, a future is presented that is much more worrisome than any robot takeovers or futuristic galactic battles. His stories take place in the near future, mere decades away from where life currently stands, and highlight the possibilities of a world that has burnt itself to the ground with advancing technology. It is truly Black Mirror-esque, in that each story focuses on a particular piece of groundbreaking, destructive—and frankly inconceivable—technology, or an ecological disaster that occurred as a result of prolonged human influence.
In perhaps the most intriguing story, “Openness,” humans have inner eye technology that allows them to browse the internet, send emails and texts, play games and more all in their fields of vision. They blink to send messages and close out of browsers in their peripherals. Even more interesting is the addition of “layers.” Memories, thoughts and experiences are locked behind layers that one can allow others to unlock and access. These layers make it easier to share one’s life without talking, as it is “tiring to labor through sentences needed to explain how you ran into a friend—much easier to share the memory, the friend’s name and photo appearing organically.” This technology has eliminated the need for all human communication, just one factor in the demise of the main character, Andy’s, relationship with his girlfriend Katie. It is a world where “it all made [Andy] want to turn off [his] layers, go back to the old days, and stay disconnected. But you do that and you become another old guy buried in an e-reader, complaining about how no one sends emails anymore.”
All the stories offer warped prospects of the future, like in “The Cartographers,” where memories are manufactured but create an entirely new addictive technological drug, or in “Children of the New World,” and “Migration,” where people can physically live as personalized sims in a manufactured world within their own home. They step into body suits and goggles and live as their personalized avatar, going to work, interacting with friends, having sex and never having to leave their home. However, this only exacerbates the chasm between people, their physical bodies and their families. In “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” a family adopts a robot son/brother/computer/nanny hybrid only to have it malfunction and die, forcing the family to reconcile with an unhappy life. Other stories like “Heartland” and “Ice Age” demonstrate life after ecological disasters and how life would continue on, whether that is a Great Depression lifestyle or one of hunting and gathering—a true cyclical return to primitive life. Not all the stories in the collection are as successfully though-provoking and innovative as these, but even the misses prove to be a minor flaw in a collection that is equal parts extraordinary and interesting.
Children of the New World is satirical, upsetting, absurd and fascinating. It takes present day anxieties about digital isolation, technological coups, terrorism, social media and sexual promiscuity and follows them to possible, realistic extremes. Infused with satire and a cynical style, the collection resembles less like a Stephen King horror novel and more like an ominous warning. Weinstein infuses inevitability into these tales, as if whispering his cautionary note about the price humans could pay for (naively) relinquishing to technological processes that already threaten to overtake modern society. After reading Children of the New World, you can forget flying cars. A future according to Weinstein is one with a much ruder awakening that not all of us will want to wake up to.
Books we ❤️ : A Book Review by Fiction Editor Juliann Nelson
The Black Maria
by: Aracelis Girmay
“Aracelis Girmay’s poetry collection, The Black Maria, dives deep into some of the most relevant topics currently facing our society. Beginning with “elelegy,” this cycle focuses on Eritrean history and diaspora, including the deaths of nearly 300 Eritreans in 2013 as they sailed from their country in search of hope and safety in Europe.”
read more below!
The refugee crisis remains an unresolved issue still today, and Girmay’s tribute to the unfulfilled dreams of a desperate people shows the heart-wrenching reality of those left behind; the uncertainties they face and the grief they must bear. Told through the lenses of four characters named Luam, Girmay blends history and emotion effortlessly throughout the cycle, providing the context needed to understand the importance of these events and human figures to illustrate their devastating effects. Themes of darkness, distance, grief, violence, the body (particularly, the absence of), and the unknown permeate Girmay’s writing, but she also takes care to prop these up with dreams and hopes, with the gentleness of touch and the beauty of the world around us. Girmay harshly criticizes those who turn a blind eye to the devastation around them and lifts up the memories of the lost by immortalizing them in the culture and the conscious of loved ones.
The second cycle of the collection, “the black maria,” shifts from loss at sea to loss on the streets. Right here in America, right now in America, people of color are being shot and killed by those who vowed to protect them, by those who see them as “other,” who skim right over what makes us all human and focus only on what makes us different. Girmay opens the cycle by defining the black maria: those dark, empty basins on the moon, originally thought to be lunar seas (71). The concepts of misidentification and “misseeing,” not just of dark, empty moon valleys, but of the black body as something other than human, lay the foundation for this cycle (74). Girmay claims that “naming…is always an act of estrangement,” yet proceeds to name just a few of those who died in the name of misidentification throughout a series of “Estrangement” poems: Trayvon Martin, Jonathan Ferrell, Renisha McBride, and Rekia Boyd (74). The “Third Estrangement, in Memory of Jonathan Ferrell” gives a particularly vivid portrayal of the black body as “other.” Ferrell, who was shot by a white police officer in 2013, does everything he can to humanize himself in the poem in order to escape the “hunter’s” shot, but, as we have seen too many times in the news, his humanness is overlooked. Identified as mere animal life, he is gunned down.
As in the previous cycle, Girmay still finds hope in the desolate and bleak reality of being a person of color in a hate-filled America. She tells the story of Neil deGrasse Tyson as a young black boy, forever defying societal expectations to pursue the stars and his dreams. Teenaged Tyson was mislabeled as “suspicious” and “threatening” by a white neighbor, leading to a police encounter on a dark rooftop; a scenario that all too often ends in death, black life stolen by white disregard for humanity. However, Tyson was not shot, and remains to this day a highly successful astrophysicist. That story of hope gives strength to Girmay herself as she describes the fear she has for her own son growing up in the wake of police brutality and the continued dehumanization of people of color in America.
Stylistically speaking, Girmay plays with several poetic devices and formats, occasionally drifting into rhyme schemes and form poetry. An untitled poem about the Obelisk of Axum features a beautifully lyrical dance with rhyme scheme:
To be near sea is to gleam
with dream, though to cross
means loss. But behold
the gold & strolling
“nobodies” cajoling,
& the frees off running
from lead & gunnings to
the bleak audition. (42)
Girmay also incorporates some prose for the more context-providing historical notes, but writes mostly in free verse, allowing the voice of the characters and the content of the poems themselves to shine, flowing easily from subject to subject, and developing continuity both within each cycle and between them.
Aracelis Girmay has cultivated a collection of poetry that is not only beautiful, but also incredibly important and necessary for our modern society. Girmay tackles these hard hitting subjects with grace and tenderness, reminding us always that beauty can be found even in the darkest of times. The Black Maria honors the lives of the fallen and encapsulates the universal grief of loved ones left behind. Style, history, and emotion coalesce in Girmay’s writing to create a heartbreaking, unforgettable collection of poetry that the world needs now more than ever.
Books we ❤️ : A Book Review by Fiction Editor Madeline Klein
Bad Feminist
by Roxane Gay
“A fierce collection of essays that is equal parts provocation and compassion, Bad Feminist gives us the brilliant, if brutal, display of Roxane Gay’s ability to take America’s cultural pulse and remind us exactly where it is that we stand.”
Keep Reading Below!
Through her eyes, we see the country’s progress and potential, but we also confront the price at which that progress was won and the pain of all the potential that remains yet unfulfilled. The very existence of Bad Feminist—an essay collection written by a black woman whose sharp criticism on such topics as race, gender, and sexuality earned her work a place on the New York Times bestseller list—attests to this uncomfortable but accurate conception of the United States as a nation that has come a long way from a place it should never have been, and that is still struggling to get to where it should really be.
Gay is as reliable a guide as one could hope to have through a cultural landscape so fraught with contradiction and injustice, especially because she admits to her own shortcomings. Bad Feminist indeed begins with an essay called “Feminism (n.): Plural,” in which Gay openly identifies as “flawed and human” and reminds us that the imperfections of a person or a movement do not disqualify or delegitimize them. We need feminism, and we need Roxane Gay. Oh my God, do we need Roxane Gay.
We need her to be blunt about the reality of privilege, in terms of both gender and race. We need her to give us the realistic pictures of women that society persistently and vindictively withholds: women who are as flawed and human as Gay proclaims herself to be and as utterly badass as we all know she is. As a liberal woman, I am well aware of my place in the choir to which Roxane Gay is preaching. While that may be a bias, it certainly is not a flaw, and I find myself unable to apologize for my predictable love of Bad Feminist, or for feminism itself. It’s crazy to think that we still live in a world where anyone could want to make me apologize for those things.
It’s crazy and it hurts and it’s true and there are things I can do about it. That’s what Roxane Gay’s essays say to racism and sexism. That’s what any reasonable person should say to racism and sexism. What are those things, though, that we can do? Gay might be critical, and her tone often takes on the understandable cynicism that her subject matter practically requires, but she is not without hope. She is not so incessantly pessimistic as to leave her readers with nothing but a heavy “shit ain’t working out” (247).
Bad Feminist reminds us that “change sometimes does begin with one person who raises her voice”—and it’s so nice to see that pronoun, her—(262), that we have to “look to how we can best support the least among us” (260) if we truly wish to define ourselves as a single, undivided nation, and that when it comes to fights for social justice, “even if we can only fight the small ones, at least we are fighting” (168). Roxane Gay’s willingness to write about both extremes—the tragedy of systemic discrimination and the beauty of persistent hope—is what truly sets her apart. She is afraid neither to face the worst of humanity nor to retain hope in the best of it. It could also be that she is afraid, but that she takes on these tasks anyway. Either way, Bad Feminist is both a gift and a necessity, and all I have left to say is thank you.
This week our wonderful little town was graced with the presence of the illustrious MacArthur Fellow, National Book Award winner, and bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead. His 2016 novel, which fictionalizes the historical Underground Railroad as an actual, cross-country subway-esque system for runaway slaves, debuted as an instant success with widespread acclaim. The Underground Railroad became a ubiquitous fixture on nearly every “Best Books of 2016” list, including those for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and even Buzzfeed. After the novel’s inclusion into Oprah’s Book Club and President Obama’s Summer Reading List, Whitehead cemented himself as one of the greatest writers of our time.
Self-acclaimed childhood loner, Whitehead jokingly referred to his search for a career that would accommodate his introversion and “slender hands and feminine wrists.” After ruling out pianist (the benches have no lumbar support), hand model (too conservative an upbringing for the modeling industry), and heart surgeon (standing for 15-hour surgeries? No thank you.), Whitehead found his calling as a writer. Sort of. After multiple rejections, his first novel The Intuitionists was published in 1999. Since then, Whitehead has published six novels, two nonfiction works, and several essays and short stories that have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Granta, among others. He cites Stephen King as a major inspiration, as well as magical realist authors like Márquez and Borges. While preparing for The Underground Railroad, Whitehead looked to Toni Morrison’s Beloved for motivation and to first person slave narratives for authenticity. Because his novel is fictional, Whitehead claimed he was less concerned with the historical accuracy of timelines and events, and instead focused more on creating believable, sympathetic characters by researching the language and colloquialisms of the nineteenth century.
To end the night, Whitehead read a few passages from The Underground Railroad: the beating of a ten-year-old boy at an elderly slave’s birthday dance to show the outright cruelty of the masters, a “biographical” segment that delves into the horrifying inner thoughts of a slave-hunter, and a debate scene on the “black utopian” Valentine farm in Indiana. Whitehead’s sardonic sense of humor, keen insights into human emotion, and down-to-earth, genuine attitude that pervade his work were just as pleasant to experience in real life. Unafraid of diving into difficult subjects and being open with his own feelings and experiences, Colson Whitehead’s overall greatness as a human being made for a memorable event and enlightening glimpse into the mind of an actual genius.
Books we ❤️ : A Book Review by Fiction Editor Kiersten Mann
Bright Dead Things
By: Ada Limón
“A simple story, but we all have those ‘bright dead things’ that we loved, that we killed for loving too much.”
Read the full review below
Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón is a beautiful collection of honest and strong poetry which follows Limón’s life from Brooklyn to Kentucky, the death of her Stepmother, finding love, and confronting her fears. They are poems of transition, of slipping from one state to another. It might be a geographical move of state or it might be an inner transition from a caretaker to a mourner. Limón puts into beautiful words what the rest of the world has always felt, how we might not all be Latino, but we all come from cultures and ethnicities that we can’t separate ourselves from and we know what she means when she writes “I stare at the/ weird fruit in my hand and wonder what it is to lose a spiny/ layer.”
The strongest poems in Limón’s collection seem to occur at random and the subjects are wide and varied. Dogs, death, horses, race and identity, and carrots. In her poem “Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America” Limón writes “I’d like to be Emily Dickinson’s dog, Carlo, / and go on loving the rare un-loveable puzzle/ of woman and human and mind.” A wish that we have probably all had, to be a dog whose only want is “to be your only dog, your best-loved dog, for the good dog of today/ to be the only beast that matters.” It is a poem like this that seems simple and mundane, at first, that really shows Limón’s talent because it touches on what every person truly desires which is the same thing that any dog does, to be the only one and the best-loved one. She complicates the mundane once again in her poem “I Remember the Carrots”, which gave the collection its title. She writes “When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots/…And so I ripped them all out. I broke the new roots/ and carried them, like a prize, to my father/ who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop.” A simple story, but we all have those “bright dead things” that we loved, that we killed for loving too much. Even though we aren’t children anymore and we know better there are still times when we feel what Limón feels when she writes that “there are days I still want to kill the carrots because I can.” We want to exert that small bit of total power that we have over weaker creatures, so we can have control.
Her poems are written in free verse which lends to the story-like nature they possess. They seem to be snapshots into her life, moments of intense feeling that might be told through the simplest of objects. She has these quirky poems about dogs and carrots, but this collection also contains beautiful and touching poems about death and grief. In the poem “After You Toss Around the Ashes” Limón confronts her feelings of uselessness during her stepmother’s final weeks and her grief after her death. She battled with loving herself and getting back to her life, but it was after finding love that she could come to terms with her loss. The most beautiful line of the whole collection came from that inner struggle to find self-love again, she writes “I remembered what had been circling/ in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.” It is Limón’s gorgeous prose and her multilayered poems which cause this collection to transcend the ordinary and become a work of beautiful art.
Books we ❤️ : A Book Review by Fiction Editor Rachel Levin
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God
by Etgar Keret
“It can be uncomfortable for some to allow their minds to contort to the odd realities Keret creates, but it is also an incredible experience once one does.”
Read the full review below
One of the best things about The Twilight Zone is its ability to twist the realities of human thought. Everything you thought you knew can be morphed into some virtual reality where nothing makes sense and basic rules of the universe are bent. However, some aspects of common culture remain behind, thus further contorting what we know as normal versus what is strange.
This is essentially Etgar Keret’s The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, and I loved it just as much.
Keret is an Israeli writer who has composed a collection of short stories just as fascinating as it is dark. With The Twilight Zone, each episode is designed to reveal some inner problem with our culture, ideologies, instinct, character or societal norms. This is done in Keret’s work through dark humor, virtual reality, and poignant endings. Keret explores the afterlife in different lenses, displays human nature in all its nakedness and develops characters who are unapologetically honest and equally realistic.
The darkness in this novel comes from odd, twisted realities and bold discussions of heaven, hell and the afterlife. In “Uterus,” a boy’s dead mother has her “beautiful uterus” put on display in a museum, which he becomes obsessed with. “Kneller’s Happy Campers” is a 26-part story that takes place in an afterlife for those who have committed suicide, with the ways they each “offed” visible on their bodies. “Good Intentions” takes pieces of reality through an assassin paid to murder a man cursed with a disorder that only allows him to do good deeds. In “Souvenir from Hell,” a hole to hell is open and a woman falls in love with a sinner who crawls out every so often. It is distorted circumstances like these that make Keret’s stories so fascinating, because while untrue, they spark kinship in readers through the blunt, ethical truths characters deal with and the actualities of the human conscious.
Keret also does not shy away from the different mediums of human unhappiness. It is through this that perhaps one of the most blatant themes in this novel, “escape,” takes the human need for change and desperation and puts it in virtual reality. Characters confront the need to run, to jump out of a plane or desert a societal or internal expectation. In the story “Pipes,” an unmotivated, average man working in a pipe factory builds pipes large enough to crawl through. The pipe leads him to heaven, where he claims, “Heaven is simply a place for people who were genuinely unable to be happy on earth.” This man, like several other unhappy characters, find other means of escape from a world that gave them nothing. However, the afterlife is sometimes not much better, an idea in which Keret asks of his audience what it truly means to be happy. These stories are perhaps the most raw, as they highlight real human emotion and explore the most difficult truths people face.
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God is a collection of stories that are odd, hypnotizing and force the reader to confront some taboo aspect of their nature. Thus, it can be uncomfortable for some to allow their minds to contort to the odd realities Keret creates, but it is also an incredible experience once one does. The style of this novel is poignant, the characters are honest, and anyone who decides to take a walk into this twilight zone will never be the same.
We at Magic Jar were delighted to host poet and IU professor Ross Gay this week! After chowing down on some donuts, we got a behind the scenes look into Ross’s own literary magazine, Some Call It Ballin’. Ross shared his editorial experiences with the magazine and gave us advice on communicating with authors, developing an aesthetic style, and working together to curate the best possible content for the inaugural issue of Magic Jar. Ross shares our vision of publishing up and coming writers, and his endless enthusiasm and upbeat persona have been a source of motivation for our team from the beginning. As a collective fandom, our editors were thrilled to hear some of Ross’s latest works, including an essay collection he is in the process of writing. Ross’s dedication to the community, the Earth, and the art of writing have inspired the Magic Jar team, and we can’t wait to utilize his words of wisdom in our own publication. We want to thank Ross for his visit and for sharing his work and advice with us!
Books we ❤️ : A Book Review by Poetry Editor Anthony Singer
Wild Hundreds
By: Nate Marshall
University of Pittsburgh Press
Print-ISBN-13: 9780822963837
$11.99, 72 pages
“While a careful and meticulous reading of Marshall’s work has its value, believe me when I say that the riptide is exactly where you want to be. Let Marshall pull you out to open sea, far away from the comfort of control, and allow the waves of his beautiful, tragic love for Chicago’s South Side wash over you.”
Today is Valentine’s Day, a day now dominated by heart-shaped candies, ruby red roses, and candlelit dinners. Vast quantities of resources have been used in the quest to express affection on this particular day, though on a holiday which seems to aim at capturing the spirit of love, simple affection strikes me as a rather reductive representation of a complex human experience. Love is affectionate, indeed, but it’s also joyous, tormenting, delirious, confusing, and defiant, much like Nate Marshall’s debut collection of poetry, Wild Hundreds. This portrait of Chicago’s South Side seeks to capture all of the intricacies and nuance of Marshall’s love for the place that raised him.
Marshall immediately sets out to ground the reader’s sense of place in the community’s collective identity and ways of life. His opener, “repetition & repetition &,” stresses the vibrancy of his fellow “hundreds” and their willingness to be “live” at all times, limited only by their own ambitions. Marshall invites the reader to step into the classroom for a quick lesson in the proper pronunciation of his beloved home, taking the time to introduce the syllables one at a time with care, and alternately invokes onomatopoeia, makes historical references, and advocates for efficiency in elocution to further imbue the reader with the South Side’s linguistic sensibilities.
After establishing the foundation of the “whilehunits,” Marshall begins to unspool a number of threads throughout the collection, and these interrelated pieces give both the poet and the reader a chance to dwell on and process a number of different emotions and sensations as they move through the book. One set of poems, which pops up throughout the book take the shape of tantalizingly taut “love letters,” offers respite from the often intense mood of the other poems and evokes the fleeting and affectionate feeling of young romance. Another, which chronicles Marshall’s experiences over time with a popular restaurant in his neighborhood, provides a space for ruminations on white flight, black masculinity, and staying true to one’s roots (or not). A pair of poems, which are thematically situated around the academic milestone of graduating from the 8th grade and located at the outset of the book’s third and final act, engages with the frustrating notion that one’s physical location can also serve as a state of mind which informs an individual’s sense of self-worth and perceptions of future expectations.
Nate Marshall’s style facilitates a rapid reading of his work, and in collection weighing in at a brief 72 pages in length (63 of which contain Marshall’s poetry), one might be tempted to swim against the current in an attempt to resist being dragged through the book at such a dizzying pace. While a careful and meticulous reading of Marshall’s work has its value, believe me when I say that the riptide is exactly where you want to be. Let Marshall pull you out to open sea, far away from the comfort of control, and allow the waves of his beautiful, tragic love for Chicago’s South Side wash over you.
I was able to read this book online through Indiana University’s partnership with Project MUSE, but immediately upon finishing Wild Hundreds, I went to Amazon to ensure that I could secure my own copy of the book as soon as possible. It’s not often I read something that makes me feel like I’m drowning, but it’s a sensation I want to have access to for years to come.
Our editor-in-chief @yaelephants is currently #reading Juliana Spahr's poetry book, Well Then There Now. What are you reading this morning? 🌺🌈🐦 #literary #poetry #amreading #julianaspahr #litjournal #hawaii #aloha🌺 #ecology
Books We ❤️ : A Book Review by Fiction Editor Juliann Nelson
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
by Karen Russell
“If you’ve just closed your book and are now wondering, “What on earth did I just read?” that book may have been Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. This short story collection features eight tales that range from disorienting to downright disconcerting...”
read the full review below
Each of Russell’s stories feature some magical, other-worldly element that is rooted in the human experience. From depression and anxiety to regret and guilt, Russell manages to make even dead United States presidents reincarnated as horses somehow relatable purely through emotional insight. Her prose is unique, yet lyrical, as Russell flows seamlessly through the minds of a centuries-old vampire, an eleven-year-old homesteader, and a middle-aged massage therapist. Though her dialogues and perspectives vary greatly throughout the collection, Russell achieves this feat without sacrificing depth of characterization or loss of authenticity.
The stories of Vampires in the Lemon Grove feature endings that are largely left open to the imagination of the reader. Some may call this dissatisfying, but the abrupt conclusions serve to heighten the intentional sense of confusion or eeriness that permeates Russell’s prose. The stories are intriguing in their strangeness; the gathering suspense and withholding of critical information leaves readers dazed and desperate for more. I could scarcely contain my own outcry of surprise and indignation at finding a blank page after the world’s biggest cliffhanger in “Proving Up.” Russell’s style is a reflection of reality, as well. Real life is confusing, uncertain, and open-ended. Russell may write about girls-turned-silkworms, time-traveling seagulls, and movable tattoos, but she never strays so far as to be completely unreachable for readers. For example, in “Reeling for the Empire,” Kitsune, a silkworm-girl, struggles with regret and her own free will:
“I had an unreckonable power. I didn’t know that at the time… I can feel them webbing around me: my choices, their infinite variety, spiraling out of my hands, my invisible thread.” (45)
In “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979,” anxious Nal lives in the shadow of his charming brother and depressed mother:
“He wanted to get to a place where he wasn’t thinking about every movement at every second; where he wasn’t even really Nal any longer but just weight sinking into feet, feet leaving the pavement, fingers fanning forcelessly through air, the swish! of a made basket and the net birthing the ball.” (56)
In “The New Veterans,” Beverly, the massage therapist preoccupied with saving and healing since her parent’s deaths, finds she can erase more than just muscle aches for a war vet:
“Memories are inoperable. They are fixed inside a person, they can’t be smoothed or soothed with fingers.” (177)
Russell’s vivid imagination brings these characters to life on the page, and invites the reader to embrace the weirdness of life along with all of its hardships. From the relatively more light-hearted “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating” to the outright creepy “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” this collection explores and interacts with a large range of characters, settings, time periods, perspectives, and experiences. Karen Russell does so artfully and distinctively in Vampires in the Lemon Grove, setting her apart from others who may lack such vast creative capabilities.
germansingergirl
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
gummygunk