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Counternarratives

John Keene (Goodreads Author)

4.18 · Rating details · 430 ratings · 74 reviews

Conjuring slavery and witchcraft, and with bewitching powers all its own, Counternarratives continually spins history—and storytelling—on its head

Ranging from the 17th century to the present and crossing multiple continents, Counternarrative’s novellas and stories draw upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculative fiction t ...more

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Hardcover, 320 pages

Published May 5th 2015 by New Directions

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Jun 13, 2018 Hugh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-lit, read-2018

This extraordinary book first came to my attention when it won the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for small presses last year. I finally got round to reading it because it has been chosen for a group read by the 21st Century Literature group which is due to start tomorrow. It is a collection of short stories and novellas, which explore black history (some real, some imagined, all full of impressive period detail). Its scope runs from from the 17th century to the present day, ranging ...more

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Jan 28, 2017 Paul Fulcher rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fitzcarraldo-fiction, 2017, republic-of-consciousness-2017

Within the context shaped by a musket barrel, is there any ethical responsibility besides silence, resistance and cunning?

Another book drawn to my attention via the wonderful Republic of Consciousness Prize and another thought provoking and worthwhile book.

Generally speaking I don't like to read too many reviews before I read a book, but this was one where doing so certainly added to my appreciation. Indeed I was struggling to really appreciate the book until I did e.g. I hadn't appreciated that ...more

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Feb 22, 2017 Neil rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, 5-stars, re-read, 2017-rofc

A review at brickmag.com says: "Throughout Counternarratives, Keene shows History to be woefully lacking in black subjectivities—more mirrors are needed, new mirrors, and this book offers up a panoply of reflections and refractions, a staggering range of voices, places, and styles: seventeenth-century Brazil, revolutionary Haiti, a nunnery in frontier Kentucky, a Civil War hot-air balloon, nineteenth-century Paris, and Depression-era Harlem, the epistle, the gothic, the monologue, the biographic ...more

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Jul 19, 2015 Liviu rated it it was amazing

Shelves: shorts, 2015_release_read, mainstream, read_2015, top_25_2015_novels

saw this in a bookstore and couldn't put it down once I opened it, so i had to get a copy; very well written so far, a multiple strand vignette like narrative set in various places and times (starts in Brazil 1600-1700's and then moves to Puritan America mid 1700's)

read two more "narratives" from the book and it is still very impressive; very different voices, styles and characters and still keeping me turning pages

finished the book and it was very impressive to the end - the last (generally sho ...more

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May 13, 2019 Tayari Jones rated it really liked it

The man is a genius,

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Sep 30, 2015 Tuck rated it it was amazing

Shelves: natural-history, oh-loyd-i-wanna-be-hearkbroken, pre-wwi, sailing-and-fighting, south-africa, spain, this-ain-t-a-louis-lamour-type-of-p, short-stories, western-rural-with-tractors-horse, wine-and-food

short stories and novellas mostly about colonial times in n n s amer, specifically british colonies in new england and Lusitania in the south of the porteguese, and their uses and abuses of blacks and indians. so historical fiction but not too much period lingo, but just enough vocabulary to 'take you back'...well written, cool real characters, not polemic but told straight so reader has no doubt of the hypocrisy of the idea of lesser and greater humans. get your history and entertaining too.
he ...more

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Sep 15, 2017 Justin Evans rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction

I've put off writing a review of this book for months, because I wanted to do justice to it. I can't. It's really good, really intelligent--Keene can write, and despite setting himself up for intellectual failure (the obvious problem with 'counternarratives' being that they create a Manichean world), he doesn't fail. The moral horrors of racism in the Americas are made entirely plain, as are the mechanisms used to keep it in place, but they're never attributed to some evil cabal. They are the so ...more

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Apr 22, 2015 Mickey rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-to-buy, black-fiction

Wonderful book. It looks at historical moments in history from pre-Revolutionary War to present history from the viewpoints of people of color. He takes the moments that were just footnotes in a historical document or a small announcement in a newspaper and turns them into beautifully written fully-realized stories.

Click the link below to hear more of my thoughts on this wonderful short story collection.

https://youtu.be/KN5wASy4CwU ...more

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Jul 23, 2015 Erinisfantastic rated it really liked it

This book is brilliant. It was downright difficult to read in spots, and yet I still thought it was amazing. I did think there were a COUPLE stinker stories (if I was more fluent in history, I'm sure they would have made more sense), which is the only reason I'm holding back a star. There should be more short form historical fiction in the world, and it all should be written by John Keene. ...more

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Jun 22, 2018 Marc rated it really liked it

Shelves: postmodern-avantgarde-experimental, historical-fiction, first-book-i-read-by-this-author, owned

It's not so much that I enjoyed this book as I found it fascinating and rather absorbing. Keene's stories operate on so many different levels as he dramatizes history while giving voice to the marginalized in ways that peel back the false veneer of accepted truths and retold myths, especially as it relates to the Americas and the black experience. The sum is greater than the parts, although many of the parts are exceptional in their own right. The amount of research and deliberation that went in ...more

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Mar 06, 2017 Jackie Law rated it liked it · review of another edition

Counternarratives, by John Keene, is a collection of historical fiction pieces imaginatively written in the style of reportage. Most are set in America through the centuries of slavery leading up to the practice’s eventual abolition. The exploration of ingrained and continuing racial prejudice is percipient and depressing.

The ownership of people, the cruelties inflicted and the effect this had on all is presented in a variety of settings. The attitude that troublesome slaves should be broken, th ...more

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Aug 08, 2020 Miriam rated it really liked it

I enjoyed the premise of this book, especially the stories in which he takes on a scholarly tone to tell a story left out of history. I loved "Gloss, ot the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows" for literally being a footnote. The title of "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" is SO GOOD to be followed by a story of a man bumping up against the law and colonial society repeatedly as he tries to be free. Zion steals and fights and runs and is not an easy chara I enjoyed the premise of this book, especially the stories in which he takes on a scholarly tone to tell a story left out of history. I loved "Gloss, ot the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows" for literally being a footnote. The title of "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" is SO GOOD to be followed by a story of a man bumping up against the law and colonial society repeatedly as he tries to be free. Zion steals and fights and runs and is not an easy character to pin such a title to, but that's what makes it so great--his crimes are his own, his attempt to fight back against a society that wants to control him.

I also loved the span of the Americas, looking at slavery and oppression throughout and finding commonalities everywhere, especially in Brazil, often used as a counterpoint to U.S. History: race mixture and prejudice, casual cruelty many times based on an idea of superiority in the cruel one, resistance and complex inner worlds--I especially liked the way that many of the narrators find those in charge to be unworthy of respect, sharply observing the oppressors' flaws and biding their time for action. Like Burunbana at the mission in Brazil or Carmel in Kentucky. Their contempt, rendered in such beautiful language, is palpable and powerful. The discipline of History has too often treated historical subjects that way for unjustified and unjustifiable reasons: it's nice (although unsettling) to see the tables turned. (I hope it's clear what I mean: History writers and practitioners have judged people and marginalized them and treated the subject of History as the province of the few and turned their contempt on the many for no good reason, other than that they ARE the many, the not-privileged, whereas Keene's narrators have VERY good reasons to be contemptuous of some of these people. The people who don't listen or see or actively try NOT to listen or see, the cruel and mean and self-serving and condescending and those who depend on others but treat them like nonhumans, those who would benefit from the pain or spectacle of others.)

I think it would be really interesting to read "Rivers," about what happened to Jim from Huckleberry Finn years after the end of the story, alongside Huckleberry Finn in a class. To talk about how we talk about that book and Mark Twain and what we think about teaching "race" in high school especially and congratulating ourselves for taking on Tough Subjects from a safe historical distance and yay racism is dead NOW, of course. One white guy protagonist sort of maybe reconsiders his assumptions, and the world is saved! And OF COURSE Tom Sawyer became a vocal white supremacist. And Huck gets no absolution either. And yet Jim has such sympathy for them (although his contempt for them also comes through in his precise sizing-up of them and his refusal to go into his actual life story with them, knowing it means nothing to them and therefore he owes them nothing. Maybe I don't mean contempt? But an acknowledgement of a gap between them and a perception that that gap is the fault of the other side and a pity and sad but also angry-making? Is all of that a word?). I say he can have sympathy for them as well as contempt because HE can see the reasons why they turned out like they did (even acknowledging that Huck has probably seen some hardship in the intervening years) and that their world is crumbling and they're angry and fighting back, but their lack of appreciation for (and their unwillingness or inability even to consider) HIS side of things, going all the way back to that infamous raft trip down the Mississippi, is unacceptable, immoral even.

I thought "The Aeronauts" was boring and long for such an abrupt ending. I could grasp the purpose of "Persons and Places," to tell a story of a not-meeting from two perspectives, but the subtlety of the observations was lost on me. I really liked "Cold" for its portrayal of mental illness and cognitive dissonance coming to a head. I thought "The Lions" merited its own section for its "outside-of-time"ness (which even the characters IN the story reckon with), although it's clearly more contemporary. But the characters are unnamed and more general than the glosses of historical figures, so it felt different? And then I was trying to read it like an allegory and although my idea doesn't really fit the story exactly, it got me thinking about the formation of states in the tradition of colonialism. These two characters are a deposed ruler and his betrayer-successor, the second telling the first he should have expected it (his betrayal, his fall). And I was thinking: this is the rise of a new power telling an old power that everyone's days are numbered within such a system, built on acquiring land, money, power, even if some of the people doing all of that think they're doing it for a good reason. And so the second, new leader also numbers his own days from the time he seizes power, but the system goes on.

I was just thinking about a talk I attend in grad school in which this high-ranking professor from another somewhere had a very careful theory all laid out about the historical march of the center of civilization westward. He started in China, went through Europe, ended in the Americas. (all of this was so weird to me at the time and still is--how can you tell where the "center" of something like "civilization" is? What criteria would you use to show that? Why would someone want to make such weird sweeping claims about history?) And, in the question and answer portion, I asked him about the next step, if his theory would predict the future and the march of civilization back to Asia as "west" became "east" on the globe to keep on marching that direction. He did NOT like that. His theory was meant to show where we are NOW (how very Hegelian: history culminated in ME and thus is now over), not the FUTURE (which was most likely going to be very much like the present, how dare you suggest otherwise). It's interesting to look at counternarratives of that march of civilization westward and to ask about rises and falls (and not assume any group is immune from a fall) and contextualize what's really gained and lost in such a march, and how without such counternarratives we'd keep telling only the nicest parts (for those on top) and ignoring even how exactly many of those "civilizations" were built with the labor of oppressed peoples that get us to where we are today. ...more

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Sep 14, 2016 Kobe Bryant rated it it was amazing

This book is about the black experience and freedom and a lot of other things and it's surprisingly varied. "The Aeronaut" was my favorite ...more

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Nov 12, 2020 Silkec rated it liked it

Read half of it
Loved some stories very much, some others could not spark my interest

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Jun 21, 2018 LindaJ^ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, literary, experimental

These are not your typical short stories. A couple are of novella length. This historical fiction that is not so fictional and involve history that is not so familiar. The primary settings are the countries now known as the United States and Brazil. The primary characters are individuals of color; it is through their eyes that the reader sees the history unfold; much of the history was not familiar to this North American reader. This is history as seen through the eyes of those who did not (and ...more

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Jul 06, 2016 Julia rated it liked it

simply better & working harder than probably all contemporary(ish) fiction i've read recently? the sort of book that attunes you to the complacency of most surrounding writing. the complacency of only writing from the present in the present, of writing from what directly concerns you, or rather of thinking that what directly concerns you is simply what you see, what is obviously tangible in the now, the people you walk past in the grocery store whom you try to turn into relatable individuals jus ...more

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Mar 10, 2017 Gumble's Yard rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017, roc-prize-winners, 2017-republic-of-consciousness

Under the circumstances, are there any benefits to dedication, devotion, honor, responsibility? What. in this context, is the responsible action? Is it even possible to invoke a rhetoric of ethics? Only repetition produces tangible benefits, which include the stability of a routine (however precarious) and the forestalling of longer term considerations that might provoke the following emotions: fear, indecision, paralyzing despair. In the absence of a stable context, the question of ethics intr

...more

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Feb 23, 2018 Steve rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, cult-books

John Keene's Counternarratives, published in 2017, is a literary experiment, an attempt to add nuance and balance to the grand narrative of Western Civilization. Its frequently surreal tales deal with the lives of indigenous peoples, African slaves, and minorities whose lives take place beneath the radar of European colonialism in the Western hemisphere. Other stories involve African-American artists and composers whose work didn't fit into the "whitegeist" of their era.

Keene's fictions are set John Keene's Counternarratives, published in 2017, is a literary experiment, an attempt to add nuance and balance to the grand narrative of Western Civilization. Its frequently surreal tales deal with the lives of indigenous peoples, African slaves, and minorities whose lives take place beneath the radar of European colonialism in the Western hemisphere. Other stories involve African-American artists and composers whose work didn't fit into the "whitegeist" of their era.

Keene's fictions are set in a world like ours, where events like wars and economic upheavals form the distant backdrop for the action. Most often, the black characters are agents of chaos and disorder in the workings of white civilization, virtually invisible in societies geared toward privileging white institutions and experience until they transgress conventions meant to limit their agency.

In one story, Keene explicitly appropriates characters from Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer to create a postmodern postscript to the iconic American saga. Here, former runaway slave Jim relates how he meets Tom and Huck later in life, when the two irrepressible boys have grown up to become cynical, racist carpetbaggers.

It's fascinating that the concept of altitude comes up in Keene's stories, as if he's suggesting that physical location in reference to the ground is a function of consciousness or advancement. In one tale, an African-American serving as assistant to a scientist in the Union Army during the Civil War gets trapped in a hot air balloon rising above Washington.

The story that's worth the price of admission alone is the jaw-droppingly brilliant novella "Gloss," in which Keene's full vision is realized. It begins as a dry treatise on a Midwestern church. However, it's interrupted by a footnote worthy of David Foster Wallace that chronicles the trials and tribulations of Carmel, a slave and seer whose masters take her from revolution-torn Haiti to America. Soon she takes over the narration in first person and describes the havoc she wreaks with her artistic powers on a convent school in Kentucky, where she's trapped with her master's peevish daughter. Finally Carmel exacts revenge in a sequence wherein, once again, Keene envisions black consciousness taking literal flight:

Perhaps, I find myself recounting to Phedra, Marinette and others, it will be left to the patience of someone else more devoted to the genre of literature than I to record the noises that filled that hot and moonless night in Kentucky, or the taste that lingered on the tongues of the few survivors after the gunpowder stored beneath the printing press caught fire, or the particular stench of burning brick and plaster and ink fused with flesh and hair, or the feeling of being thrown far, far into the black air with nothing to halt your eventual fall back to the parched, grassless soil ... I personally will never forget how that scene—so distant from where I was then that it required all my powers to concentrate—reminded me of nothing less than a forget-me-not, white with bright scars of crimson and azure, holding fast like a last memory or reliquary of sorrows against the bluffs above a small, almost forgotten provincial island or inland colonial town.

...more

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Nov 27, 2017 Diana McClure rated it it was amazing

John Keene's Counternarratives is a mind blowing read. My synapses were popping and my chi and prana were flowing at epic levels with each turn of the page. As a collection, the short stories crisscross time and culture in an imagintive exploration of unique, obscure and eclectic fictional stories filled with historical references to centuries of Black diasporic life. It may require, at a minimum, an open, expansive, and fluid mind to even begin to taste the literary pleasures found in John Keen ...more

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Apr 24, 2017 Chelsey rated it it was amazing

The novella "Gloss" is in itself worth the price of admission. From Haitian revolution to Kentucky convent, an astonishing, inventive story about a mute enslaved girl with visionary artistic powers and a knockout ending. ...more

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Oct 24, 2019 Rat rated it it was amazing

Shelves: black-authored-narratives, horror, mixtape, owned-used

I’m a big fan of learning about history. It’s like a giant story book stretching out until the end of time, filled with love, betrayal, discovery, and loss. What I don't love about history is the overwhelming dread I feel when I stop to consider all the people left out of the books, their lives becoming stories humanity can only guess at and recreate through historical fiction. The problem, though, is that authors still repetitively tell the stories of British explorers and white Americans in Wo

This anthology, being a collection of thirteen short stories and novellas, follows the lives of those who have been neglected from being mentioned in the textbooks about the founding of America - in this case African Americans - who at the most get mentioned in a footnote. From enslaved people on ships and farms of the 17th century, to inventors during the Civil War, Keene takes his audience on a tour through time and empires. His characters feel like real people and the prose often makes you feel like you’re reading a textbook, and you often forget you’re reading fiction.

My absolute favorite short story out of this anthology is “Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows.” “Gloss” is formatted like a seventy-six page footnote which follows a young, enslaved girl named Carmel who is overlooked all of her life, crafting her as a sympathetic character to anyone who has ever felt isolated. When supernatural occurrences begin to break out around her, the story takes a surprising and entertaining turn that keeps readers riveted. “Gloss ̈ certainly has the most entertainment value in a work that can at times be dry for those who don’t enjoy a non-fiction styled prose the anthology often employs.

My second favorite in this anthology would be “The Aeronauts ̈. Although Civil War historical fiction is popular, “The Aeronauts ¨ is unique as it follows a young African American man called Red, and his ambitions to become an inventor during the war. At times, this short story made me rather uneasy, as some of Red’s criminal actions made it hard to sympathize with him. Despite this, I felt as though Keene did an excellent job in creating a disenfranchised character, realistic in his faults, yet able to keep the audience rooting for him. Keene ultimately does a fantastic job placing the reader into his protagonists shoes, creating rich, period-drawn environments and entirely human characters.
Gory and heavy around every corner, ‘Counternarratives’ is not for the faint of heart, but I fully recommend this breathtaking anthology to anyone who has sat and pondered about those left out of history and wish to take a trip through John Keene’s fictional, yet realistic take on history.

...more

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Sep 11, 2018 Charles Cohen rated it really liked it

Shelves: modern-lit, one-to-grow-on, classic

I've been thinking and reading about counternarratives quite a bit these last few months. Each of these stories - histories and fictions told by the conquered, or from the object's (rather than the subject's) point of view - forces you to reconsider what you don't hear, or see, when you read the news, or watch as a spokesperson recites talking points. It's an urgent reminder that truth is somewhere in the middle of everyone's memory, and just because something is written down in a book or a form ...more

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Aug 10, 2015 Garryvivianne rated it it was ok

Short stories, topics ranging from slavery to witchcraft. Some were very interesting, although I thought it was a hard read. Hard in meaning very very long sentences making up one paragraph, I don't really like that. It was ok. Maybe I need to give it another try. ...more

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Apr 02, 2017 Bookish Watermelon rated it it was amazing

This is an amazing collection. Historical fiction finely wrought from the perspective of the African diaspora. Cannot recommend highly enough. Vital.

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Nov 07, 2017 Taylor rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Seriously just fucking incredible.

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Dec 31, 2017 Jason rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"Knowledge is submarine," reads an epigraph taken from Barbadian poet and academic Edward Kamau Brathwaite, one of three epigraphs to christen the second section of John Keene's extraordinary COUNTERNARRATIVES (the second section amusingly titled "Encounternarratives"). Knowledge may indeed be submarine. Just as history is often, as Keene reconstructs and assesses it (and as it in fact is), subterranean. Historical fiction at its best maintains something of a big-picture vantage whilst simultane "Knowledge is submarine," reads an epigraph taken from Barbadian poet and academic Edward Kamau Brathwaite, one of three epigraphs to christen the second section of John Keene's extraordinary COUNTERNARRATIVES (the second section amusingly titled "Encounternarratives"). Knowledge may indeed be submarine. Just as history is often, as Keene reconstructs and assesses it (and as it in fact is), subterranean. Historical fiction at its best maintains something of a big-picture vantage whilst simultaneously burrowing deep into the intricacies and intimacies of the kinds of lives than might otherwise have a tendency to go unnoted. Keene provides in COUNTERNARRATIVES a series of stories and novellas that proceed in what I take to be chronological order from the discovery of the Americas (we will have to assume, as oh so many have before us, that it is possible to "discover" a place where there are already people) to a striking coda delivered in the form of a quasi-polemical valedictory endtimes harangue sometime (somewhere) during the years after "Saddam, Cheney, Ghaddafi, the rest." We very quickly become aware that Keene is in possession of an ample supply of disparate tools and that the book is going to be characterized by a bravura promiscuity of approach (right down to distinctive and autonomous experiments not only w/ form but even typography). What unites all of the pieces together is their unvarying focus on the experiences, upheavals, mystical transports, emancipatory designs, and subterranean lives of persons of the African diaspora in the Americas (and, by way of the Americas, beyond). The book's interest in the wider implications of minoritarian lives lived in the margins is perhaps best epitomized by the most cunning of Keene's many deft conceptual gambits: the near entirety of the longest novella collected here takes the form of a protracted footnote (yes, literally a footnote) to a dry just-the-facts (nominally fictional, only briefly excepted) history, in which a small incidental event, somewhat opaque, is seen to hide an extraordinary tale involving many rich and fascinating lives all leading to para-apocalyptic conflagration. Keene, a descendant of the African diaspora about which he writes, is self-consciously and productively in dialogue with his intellectual, spiritual, and literary antecedents. Not only do we have telling epigraphs from the like of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Kennedy, and the aforementioned Edward Kamau Brathwaite, but we also get reference to Frantz Fanon. Not only does Langston Hughes actually show up, but so does Mark Twain's Jim. Keene is a proud writer of proud pedigree. Not only is COUNTERNARRATIVES a very fine and multi-voiced work of literary ingenuity, it is also steadfastly (how could it not be w/ that title?) the work of an intellectual and an academic. These stories are for the most part about as far as you can get from the ever-fashionable Chekhovian slice of life. They are robust and extremely ambitious, in some places hefty w/ plot and incident, in others lithe, fiercely experimental, and language-drunk. Nobody not entirely taken w/ the work itself is hardly likely to argue that it is anything but major. ...more

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Jun 30, 2018 Andrew Bryson rated it it was amazing

I saw this on the shelf in my university's campus bookstore and bought it on impulse, based on extremely positive reviews I had read online. This is the first work I've read by John Keene, but will not be the last.

There is a moment in one of these stories when the poets Langston Hughes and Xavier Villaurrutia are discussing the work of their contemporaries. Asked his opinion of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, Villaurrutia quips: "The avant-garde without a political compass can easily b I saw this on the shelf in my university's campus bookstore and bought it on impulse, based on extremely positive reviews I had read online. This is the first work I've read by John Keene, but will not be the last.

There is a moment in one of these stories when the poets Langston Hughes and Xavier Villaurrutia are discussing the work of their contemporaries. Asked his opinion of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, Villaurrutia quips: "The avant-garde without a political compass can easily become reactionary." It's a critical judgment that would serve as a fitting motto for Keene's work.

Like Borges, Keene is a chameleon who makes himself impressively comfortable in a variety of styles. The stories in this collection range between straightforward prose narratives ("Mannahatta," "The Aeronauts"), faux-scholarly histories ("An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution"), stream-of-consciousness character studies ("Acrobatique", "Cold"), and pitch-perfect genre send-ups ("Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon," one of the collection's highlights, a fantastically lurid Gothic tale set in a 17th-century Brazilian monastery against the backdrop of colonial war between the Dutch and Portuguese). But no matter how widely Keene roams, his stories share a common alignment, as though magnetized on contact with the author's political compass.

These are, as the collection's title suggests, works that confront the canon -- sometimes quite literally, as in the much-praised "Rivers," a sort of unauthorized sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that follows Twain's characters through the turbulent decade of 1850s and into the Civil War years. Other stories use a method akin to Laila Lalami's recent novel, The Moor's Account: chipping away at the historical record of New World conquest and colonization, Keene extracts those occasional laconic sentences registering the existence of non-European lives, polishes and sets them in finely wrought "counternarratives" dense with specific period detail and rich with universal human emotion. These counternarratives become something like corrective lenses, or like windows opening onto counterhistory: as we peer through them, observing the march of events that range in significance from the intimately personal to the world-historical, we may catch a glimpse of our continent's history as it appeared from the perspective of those who were only ever treated as its objects.

Not every story here is equally successful, of course. I found myself struggling to get through some of the later stories, which are written in an increasingly fragmented Modernist narrative style; as the stories are arranged in chronological order, this has the rather unexpected effect of making those characters who stand closest to us in time seem the most distant from our understanding. Conceptually, that's a neat idea to play with; but as a reader, I simply didn't feel that the rewards of completing those later stories increased commensurate with the difficulty of doing so. Fortunately, the stories I disliked also tended to be fairly short (perhaps I just needed to read them a few more times to fully appreciate them), and it wasn't long before I reached the final story in the collection, "The Lions," which blew me away. ...more

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Sep 02, 2018 Krys rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: short-story-collections

What a breath of fresh air. A much-welcome and vital departure from the usual slice-of-life social realism that pervades much of MFA-inflected, contemporary short fiction that I've come to find suffocating and even irritating. Not everything works, but in the ones that do, there is an inevitable sense of history echoing through the centuries and winding its way into the fleeting present, through every sentence on the page.

Highlights:

"A Letter on The Trials..."
"Gloss..."
"The Lions"

There's witc ...more

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Oct 29, 2019 Emily Darwin Mittelmark rated it really liked it

Each of the stories in this text starts out kind of overwhelming in that the language and style are a little antiquated, and the subject matter is very far removed from the contemporary world. But once I got a few pages into each story, I was really invested, as the plots were kind of dramatic and, when I committed to keeping track of details, it was an intense ride. One reason this book is relevant is that it plays with structure, and it does so in a way where you maybe only realize what it's d ...more

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Nov 08, 2019 Alik marked it as to-read

Shelves: usa, short-stories, english

#6
This missive is even by the usual standards of my Correspondence a most eccentric Exchange, but I just received a note from my dear sister, Katharine, stating that she had forgotten to tell that you had come to my Father’s house enquiring of me. I initially was unaware of whom she was speaking, until she made mention of the Academy, Professor T. S. C. Lowe’s lecture, and my near-brother Peter Robins, and thus I recalled your peculiar yet delightful display of Memory, and my comments to you th ...more

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21st Century Lite...: Counternarratives - Whole Book (Jun 2018)	15	37	Aug 10, 2018 11:19AM
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About John Keene

John Keene

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John Keene is the author of the novel Annotations (New Directions); the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press), an art-text collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse; and the short fiction collection Counternarratives, newly published in 2015 by New Directions. His translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books) appeared in 2014. His stories, p ...more