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Cities
"In CITIES, Elizabeth Thorpe compresses entire novels into short-short stories. With the subtlest descriptions of how someone lifts her hair off her neck, sees a plate, or looks up at sails, Thorpe creates emotional landscapes: real people. This is a book to be savored, and read over and over again, but as John L'Heureux notes, 'no matter how many times we read it, we're not quite through it yet.' Yet while the characters are under constant pressure, they find respite in the natural world-moments of calm in the sky, the sea, the clouds, the woods, 'the wind in the trees like a freight train.' As another character finds: 'For a moment, she is buoyed.' -Jordan Hartt, author of LEAP
134 pages, Paperback
Published May 5, 2016
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June 17, 2016
Damn, this collection is very much in my wheelhouse of writing I love!
A subtle arc of emotion, intensity and interiority plays out from the first to the last of these 37 short/short stories. For me, not a single one felt like it ended on the page – a great thing – haunting me, inhabiting me for days with a range of characters and place. That is, until Cities, the title story, which sticks its landing forcefully and feather light. That whole story is one of those objects of perfection: not a word out of place or unnecessary, a cadence that drives more through deftly handled music of language than any specific stylings. I read it a dozen times and will keep going back to it to remind myself of how work like this can work at its absolute highest calling.
And then, the book has one more surprise, the story entitled Punctuation, picking back up from that completion of Cities, and leaving me living the final story, over and over and over and over...
A subtle arc of emotion, intensity and interiority plays out from the first to the last of these 37 short/short stories. For me, not a single one felt like it ended on the page – a great thing – haunting me, inhabiting me for days with a range of characters and place. That is, until Cities, the title story, which sticks its landing forcefully and feather light. That whole story is one of those objects of perfection: not a word out of place or unnecessary, a cadence that drives more through deftly handled music of language than any specific stylings. I read it a dozen times and will keep going back to it to remind myself of how work like this can work at its absolute highest calling.
And then, the book has one more surprise, the story entitled Punctuation, picking back up from that completion of Cities, and leaving me living the final story, over and over and over and over...
Displaying 1 of 1 review