I finished J. Ryan Stradal’s Great Kitchens
of the Northwest coming home on a plane from Chicago this summer and wept as I
read his acknowledgment of his mother’s powerful influence on his work. Stradal’s mother was an English major and often read her sons stories she had written as class assignments.
Stradal’s voice reminds me of
singer/songwriter John Prine. Like Prine, Stradal’s prose is full of humor and kindness, and he writes convincingly from a woman’s point of view. Great Kitchens is
centered around a food-obsessed family.
The characters are fully realized. They
experience tragedy and hardship, work long hours, fall in love, make terrible
decisions, feel burdened by family obligations and expectations, and still
manage to find hope, friendship, and community.
“An impressive feat of narrative jujitsu . . . that keeps readers turning the pages too fast to realize just how ingenious they are.”—The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Pick
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota, Kitchens of the Great Midwest is a novel about a young woman with a once-in-a-generation palate who becomes the iconic chef behind the country’s most coveted dinner reservation.
When Lars Thorvald’s wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wine—and a dashing sommelier—he’s left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own.…
Pete Hsu’s twelve stories are largely set
where I live in Southern California. The title story in the collection starts
on the freeway, where Southern Californians like me spend much of our time.
Each story is disarmingly disquieting, perfectly capturing trauma, terror, and
tragedy from the point of view of children and young people. I found Hsu’s
sentences deceivingly simple as well, which adds to the heartbreak of characters
who have no agency in this out-of-control world.
There’s hope in Hsu’s pages as well. In the
story ‘A Penny Short’ the narrator wonders if we’re “are all secretly good
people just waiting for some angel to tap us on the shoulder.”
It’sa gripping collection that left me unsettled in the best possible way.
Full of warmth, terror, and underhanded humor, If I Were the Ocean, I'd Carry You Home, Pete Hsu's debut story collection, captures the essence of surviving in a life set adrift. Children and young people navigate a world where the presence of violence and death rear themselves in everyday places: Vegas casinos, birthday parties, church services, and sunny days at the beach. Each story is a meditation on living in a world not made for us-the pervasive fear, the adaptations, the unexpected longings. A gripping and energetic debut, Hsu's writing beats with the naked rhythms of an unsettled human heart.
I love Marytza K. Rubio’s supernatural
imagination in this collection of stories and admire how strong women hold all
of their worlds together.
The self-titled novella Maria, follows the
fate of three women making sense of their legacies and supernatural abilities
in a reimagined California rainforest, shifting time and perspective.
The opening story ‘Brujeria for Beginners’
Rubio includes instructions for what Rubio calls spiritual vigilantism or
expedited karma. In ‘Carlos Across Time and Space,’ the narrator pictures a
different death for a senselessly murdered young man at a high school
graduation party.
Rubio’s stories are wildly creative and often
hysterically funny, replete with earthquakes, tarot cards, hummingbirds, black
cats, jaguars, and resurrected sabretooth tigers. There are recipes, a tenderly
conducted decapitation, and pages to color.
"The first witch of the waters was born in Destruction. The moon named her Maria."
Set against the tropics and megacities of the Americas, Maria, Maria takes inspiration from wild creatures, tarot, and the porous borders between life and death. Motivated by love and its inverse, grief, the characters who inhabit these stories negotiate boldly with nature to cast their desired ends. As the enigmatic community college professor in "Brujeria for Beginners" reminds us: "There's always a price for conjuring in darkness. You won't always know what it is until payment is due." This commitment drives the disturbingly faithful widow…
It’s the summer of 2017 in a suburban coastal
town increasingly divided by politics, protests, and escalating housing
prices—divisions that change the lives of five neighbors as they search for
home and community in a neighborhood where no one can agree who belongs.
Real estate agent Lisa Kensington juggles her
job and her family. Ray Gorman, a Vietnam vet, cares for his aging mother.
Keith Nelson, an ex-con, lives in his car. Sixteen-year-old Josh Kowalski works
through the shock of his father’s abandonment by slamming on a drum set.
Jeannette Larsen, an aerobics teacher numbed by horrific tragedy, turns away
from her husband and toward reckless behavior.
In the end, they discover that despite their
differences, they’re more connected than they ever imagined.
