How Life In Shadow-worlds Usually Goes: A Review of Yevgeniy Fiks's Moscow

The new Oz movie brought a lot to mind recently — how a corporate approach tends to result in bloat, how James Franco’s con-man character seems to be winking at the audience as his latest dupes, how somehow the other original Oz books weren’t considered good enough for their own movie — yes, these things, but also what hit home was how straight the new movie is, considering the place the 1939 Garland film had in Gay culture. When one couldn’t speak of being homosexual, once could speak of “friends of Dorothy” instead. Garland’s timeless performance of “Over the Rainbow” has been mimed by drag queens for seventy-odd years now, with its wistful expression of a need to escape to a better, more accepting place, where, as the original introduction of the song says, there “isn’t any trouble.” The happy little bluebirds and swallows became code tattoos advertising Gay trade, to the point they made appearances in forensic textbooks of the 50s and 60s as a window to the possible reason for the death of the wearer. That death, back then, was usually violent, as that’s how life in shadow-worlds usually goes.

When I landed in Moscow for my first post-graduation teaching job, Article 121, the statute that made homosexuality in Russia an offense punishable by hard labor, had only just been repealed the previous year. It had been enacted by Stalin in 1933 and was the basis for a reversal in governmental and cultural tolerance of homosexuals, which had a brief thaw that began with the bright-eyed ideals of the revolution of 1917. From the enactment of Article 121 until the 1990s, gay culture, as represented in literature or any of the media, effectively vanished. But the effect of the suppression was to generate a subculture that operated in a figurative — and often literal — underworld. As with the gay scene in the United States during the 1940s through the 1960s, the subculture developed its own non-Oz-related lingo and found public spaces where they could meet. The ubiquitous taxi-hailing-stance statues of Vladimir Lenin were nicknamed “Aunt Lena” and only those in the know understood what it meant to meet someone at Aunt Lena’s at eight. While there is an expanding array of well-researched books on pre-Stonewall gay culture in the United States, the no-less fascinating aspects of Soviet Russian gay subculture is only just beginning to find its way into print. This book is an important, if idiosyncratic, document in that regard.

This is a strange book, fragmentary even with the understanding that aspects of this story are just coming out. It consists of a brief introduction, a series of unpeopled photographs, and a pretty damned gutsy letter to Josef Stalin in 1934 — the year after Article 121 came to be law of the land, three years before the Beloved Leader really got going with putting bullets in people’s skulls. “Given the pervasive sexophobia in Soviet culture,” Kevin Moss states in his 1997 introduction to Out of the Blue, the only Russian gay literature anthology I’m aware of, “it is no wonder gay people and gay literature appeared to be completely absent.” We get an eerie sense of this in these photographs by Yevgeniy Fiks, which are of the various clandestine meeting places for gay men during the time that Article 121 was in effect: leafy parks of the Garden Ring, subway station platforms, and public underground toilets near the Kremlin. The lack of any human presence highlights the sense of isolation; the camera eye, the viewer, is isolated. The overcast skies show no shadows in this documentation of a shadow world.

The book closes with the translation of a letter sent by journalist Harry Whyte to Stalin. Whyte — born in Scotland and Communist party member—moved to Moscow to edit the English-language Moscow News. His argument of tolerance based on the ideals of Communism is interesting and, to our eyes here in the West, novel. He argues for equal footing when gays were first beginning to come out of the shadows and were forced back. “One should recognize that there is such a thing as ineradicable homosexuality,” Whyte writes in his letter. This didn’t stop Stalin from trying. And, from the efforts of those from the United States to Uganda, the attempt continues to this day.

The Art of Remembering: On Zakes Mda's Cion

Award-winning author Zakes Mda first introduced us to Toloki, the sad-eyed professional mourner paid to wail at funerals, in his novel Ways of Dying. Now in Mda’s Cion, Toloki finds his South African practice in a rut. Hoping to revitalize his art and “discover new ways of mourning,” he travels to America, a place where death is glorified to an extent unimagined — and where a chance encounter diverts him from his task and draws him deeper into the land of the living.

Cast in a surreal light, the territory Mda explores is at once familiar and strange. The politics of race, the clash between the old ways and the new, the search for the self through lineage: such themes emerge naturally out of grittily realized, emotionally entangled lives.

In the tiny town of Kivert, Ohio, Toloki is taken in by the Quigleys, a tri-racial family of four. Relentlessly, Ruth harps on politics and her grown children’s idle ways. Feeling it’s not his place to argue, Toloki initially keeps quiet. But when he falls for Ruth’s daughter, the sitar-playing Orpah, and learns that her mother is destroying her art — quilt designs that tell Orpah’s story rather than following time-honored customs — Toloki intervenes and risks losing his new family and life.

As the Quigleys’ past unfolds, so does the history of the quilts. Like Toloki’s art, the quilts keep both past and future alive.  Stories were told on them; dreams and hopes nourished by them. Ruth explains their significance thus: “people were made on them . . . people born on them, people got sick on them, people died on them, cycles of loves and losses were enacted on the quilts.”

Skillfully, the novel shuttles between Toloki’s contemporary tale and another set in 1830s Virginia. Through her stories and ingeniously coded quilts, a stud-farm slave known as “The Abyssinian Queen” teaches her sons to value freedom. One winter the two boys escape, following their quilts’ instructions as they slowly tack their way north. Eventually, one of them finds refuge among the Indians in southeast Ohio¾in a town where he meets an Irish fugitive, Niall Quigley, and past and present join in the intersection of three different cultures.

To my mind, Cion succeeds wonderfully at what fiction does best. It aligns our thoughts, our aspirations, with those of others; it de-exoticizes the foreign so we’re plunged in experience as it’s lived; and it brings the past in close so we feel its active presence. It’s the past more than anything that gives breadth to Mda’s vision. He, like the Quigleys and their ancestors, can hear ghost trees breathe out stories, can read the signs on a worn, tattered quilt.

Jake Decides To Escape Heaven and Hilarity Ensues: A Review of Cliff Hicks's Escaping Heaven

Escaping Heaven: A Comedy Of The Afterlife by Cliff Hicks starts out on what is a fairly bad day for Jake Altford, a man who is somewhat used to treating bad days with a ‘that’s life, might as well get on with it attitude.’ Jake loses his job, finds out his fiancée is cheating on him, gets into an auto accident, and is then crushed by a telephone pole. Interestingly, “that was when Jake’s really began to get bad.”

Jake is taken to heaven, where he is subjected to a series of line-ups, bureaucratic forms, and a plethora of other nonsense supposedly designed to get him to his ‘personal heaven.’ Eventually he is taken there, though, but this does not result in his day getting better:

Everyone has an idea of what their personal Heaven will be like, even if they aren’t a religious person. But no matter when and where Jake had been thinking of Heaven, this was certainly not what he had in mind. He wasn’t sure whose idea of Heaven this was. Maybe Bob Ross’s.

Today, at the insistence of the activity group’s project leader, Jake had been making a painting form macaroni. Yesterday, it had been basketweaving. Tomorrow, they were planned to do pottery.

*****

In his six weeks (or whatever) in Heaven, Jake had come to realize that they had placed him in what could only be compared to a retirement community. There were ‘guest speakers’ who would come by every so often and talk about improving one’s status in the afterlife, and not once did any of the speakers ever seem to have a clue as to what they were talking about. Still, his fellow afterlifers would clap mindlessly and nod their heads, only to regurgitate the information later, as if it was perfect.

What Jake found funniest about this was that on one day, they had had a speaker talking about positive thinking, and how it kept men and women afloat. The audience agreed and nodded, reciting their lines after the angel was gone. The next day, however, another angel showed up and lectured about how positive thinking could easily get out of hand. Sure enough, as soon as the second angel was gone, they were spouting the propaganda as if they had never heard the first angel speak.

Jake’s heaven is an endless series of crafts and motivational speakers. For some reason, despite always just having gone with the flow no matter how much he didn’t like things that happen to him, Jake decides to escape Heaven. Hilarity ensues.

No, seriously, Jake’s escape from the confusion that is heaven is one hilarious episode after another:

He pushed open the larger doors and stepped into a busier chamber. People were coming and going, bustling about, and not one of them gave Jake a second look, not even the two guards who were standing on either side of the doors he’d just come out of. He nodded to one of the two angels who were standing guard, and one of them snapped off a well-practices salute.

“Sir!” the angel barked.

Jake returned to regard him a little bit, then tried to put on his best air of superiority. He’d dealt with supervisors his whole life, and he was well aware how to act like an asshole to a subordinate. Whatever it took to blend in, he was going to do it.

Mistaken identity, pratfalls, and such; all the elements of a classic farce are there. All in all, Escaping Heaven has got to be one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Heaven is a bumbling bureaucracy. No one has any idea what is going on and they just try to act like they do, keep up appearances. No one is in charge, and absolutely no one is prepared for anyone to act different. The result is like The Three Stooges on a cosmic scale when Jake shows up and does just that.

Now, humor isn’t the only good point of Escaping Heaven either. In addition to being delightfully funny, the book is actually really well written. Jake and the supporting characters are fully developed and compelling. The plotting is fast paced and holds interest well. In short, this book is really well done. All in all, I found Escaping Heaven to be fun, engaging, and light-heartedly rebellious.

There is one last thing I should mention. I hear tell that the author is waiting on the response to this book to decide whether or not to write another. As such, I’m going to have to ask you all to buy this book, or at least read it. Really, that’s the only way I’m going to be able to find out what happens next.

Lit Pub Announces 2nd Annual Prose Contest!

We are pleased to announce our 2nd Annual Prose Contest, which is now open for entries. Submit your best prose manuscript. We’re looking for novels, novellas, memoirs, lyric essays, lyric novels, short story collections, flash fiction or prose poetry collections, and hybrid manuscripts that include prose writing. The deadline to enter is 11:59 PM EST, June 30, 2013.

* * * UPDATE * * *

We have extended the deadline to 11:59 PM EST, Aug 31, 2013!

Judging

Manuscripts will be judged by Lit Pub Books publisher Molly Gaudry and other Lit Pub staff members. Entries will be read blind, and at least one winner will be selected for publication.

About the Judge

Nominated for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel, We Take Me Apart, which was named second finalist for the 2011 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. She teaches at the Yale Writers’ Conference and is the founder of The Lit Pub.

Contest Results

The contest winner we be announced here no later than Sept 15, 2013.

Last Year’s Winner

 The winner of last year’s contest is Liz Scheid, who submitted The Shape of Blue: Notes On Loss, Language, Motherhood, Fear & Other Things, which will be available for purchase in fall 2013.

Contest Guidelines:

Prepare your manuscript as a single Word document or PDF, including a cover page with the title of your manuscript but no identifying information.

Previously-published excerpts or individual pieces are acceptable as part of your entry, but the manuscript as a whole must be unpublished.

The entry fee is $25, payable through our Submissions Manager. When you have paid the entry fee, you will be given access to submit.

You may enter as many times as you like. Each separate entry requires its own entry fee of $25.

Entrant’s name, email address, and other contact information should not appear anywhere on the uploaded file.

Entries may be simultaneous submissions, but the entry fee is nonrefundable if the manuscript is accepted elsewhere. Please notify us immediately to withdraw a manuscript that is accepted for publication elsewhere.

Winners will be announced no later than September 15th, 2013, on The Lit Pub’s website.

Current employees and writers who have a strong personal or professional relationship with the editorial staff are ineligible for consideration or publication. However, past contributors to The Lit Pub’s blog may enter, as all manuscripts will be read blind.

We comply with the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Code of Ethics.

Contest Code of Ethics

CLMP’s community of independent literary publishers believe that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. Intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree (1) to conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; (2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines—defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and (3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.

Questions?

Contact thelitpub@thelitpub.com.

An Interview with David Corbett

David Corbett’s new book on craft is a thought-provoking read that is sure to become a favored resource for writing students and established novelists alike. The Art of Character forces the reader to think introspectively and draws upon a variety of fictional works, both written and performance-based, to create as three-dimensional a character as possible. The result is a method that is intelligently organized and well-executed; a method, in fact, that was originally tested in a university setting. David Corbett’s first foray into nonfiction reflects the full weight of his many years of writing, with the authority of a thoughtful and observant novelist.

David Corbett was kind enough to sit down and answer a few of my questions, shedding light on his new release, The Art of Character.

Diana Tappert: When developing The Art of Character, what were the first few elements that you were sure you needed to touch on? How did you narrow down these essential elements?

David Corbett: I actually first formulated the content that would evolve into The Art of Character while teaching an online class through UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. With an online course you have to write out your lectures, obviously, and this was the first time I had to put my ideas into some kind of systematic format.

It became clear pretty early on that there were four major areas to cover:

Conceiving the Character
Developing the Character
Adapting the Character to a Dramatic Role
Rendering the Character on the Page

Once I had that, I could see the general arc the class — and subsequently, the book — should take.

DT: When reading The Art of Character, I noticed an eclectic mix of television, film, and book references. Everything from The Borgias to Macbeth makes an appearance; how did you decide which example would be the most illustrative of your points?

DC: It’s ironic, but since finishing the book I’ve often slapped my head and thought: “Wait, I just thought of a much better example than the one I used!”

My basic methodology, to the extent I had one, was to use examples from all three media — fiction, film, and TV — to underscore the fundamental unity of purpose and execution in the rendering of character across the board.

I also wanted to follow certain examples throughout the book — Macbeth, Blanche Dubois, Jake Gittes from Chinatown, Walter White from Breaking Bad, Kathy Nicolo from House of Sand and Fog — to provide a sense of continuity in the instruction, while also branching out with other examples to show the universality of many of the principles.

That said, I often just sat at my desk, scratching my head, thinking: “That’s a great idea. Now, where have you seen it in practice?” Sometimes it took a while for the answer to bubble up from memory. A very, very long while.

DT: As an author, lecturer, and editor, what was your goal in writing The Art of Character? Did you see a distinct lack of characterization guides in the current literary market?

DC: My goal was to return character to center stage, rather than as an adjunct to story, which has gained the upper hand with so many writing guides being written by screenwriters (Syd Field, Linda Seger, William Ackerman) or former story editors in Hollywood (Christopher Vogler, John Truby, Robert McKee).

Virtually all of these writers agree that story not rooted in character is at best facile, at worst just “one damn thing after another,” and yet I’ve found the discussion of character in their work often lacking, precisely because they focus largely on dramatic roles rather than a detailed, sophisticated exploration of the psychological, emotional, and moral subtleties in the human personality.

That said, I also believe, like all these writers, that the depiction of character works best in a dramatic rather than descriptive mode, which many aspiring writers of “literary” fiction, prizing language over action, often miss. My background in acting spared me this misconception. Not that I’m inimical to the depiction of inner life, but I feel thought and feeling work best in service to decision and action, because our actions engage us with the world and commit us to the consequence of our convictions in ways thought and feeling simply do not.

DT: Do you follow the strategy designed in The Art of Character when characterizing your own novels? Conversely, is it predominantly based on your own writing method?

DC: The second question first: I’d say the book expands on my own methodology.

In my introduction to the book, I refer to it as a toolkit, and advise students to use only those “tools” found in its pages that are necessary for the job at hand. I never use all the tactics I describe in the book while crafting my own work, but in my most recent novel I found myself often dipping into my own advice for guidance.

Some things I believe are fundamental—external desire and inner yearning, adaptation, vulnerability, secrets, contradictions. Others are helpful, some almost mystifyingly so, in conjuring the character more vividly: fear, shame, pride, quirks or bad habits, familiarity with death, relationship with food. Some necessitate your seeing the character in the context of her larger world: work, neighborhood, family (especially siblings), politics, faith. I explored all of this while developing my characters, with an eye for defining, emotionally traumatic episodes in their lives. And my newfound understanding of roles helped me craft the dramatic arc of the story more effectively and creatively.

DT: Regarding the title “Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV,” would you say the characterization process differed a great deal when comparing the three mediums?

DC: The major difference is that fiction affords access to inner life. But since I believe this often becomes more a crutch than an advantage, I find the process quite similar regardless of medium. One has a great deal less time and space in film and TV to define the character — which requires a discipline all writers need — so discerning which actions are the most definitive and dramatic is crucial. I think much of the background work in characterization remains the same; deciding what to include, what to leave out, requires perhaps a greater capacity for “murdering darlings” in film and TV than fiction, but less is more for a reason: You’re trying to engage the reader or audience, not drown them in detail.

DT: Do you hold anything particularly close as an inspiration for characters in your fiction? Did you draw from these when writing The Art of Character?

DC: As I noted above, I consider five things essential in the depiction of any major character: the connection between the external ambition and the inner yearning; the way the character responds to frustration of their desires (conflict); what makes the character vulnerable; what potentially life-altering secrets does she bear; and what contradictions does she exhibit. I also think exploration of key moments of helplessness in the character’s past — moments of fear, shame, guilt, pride, joy, love — open the character up in ways nothing else can. I also seek to understand how her physical nature affects her interaction with others, and what her social demands and standing are in the home, the workplace, the community. Once I have a decent grasp of that, I’m ready to write.

DT: What did you find hardest when writing The Art of Character?

DC: Coming up with not just acceptable examples but truly instructive ones.

DT: If you could change anything in The Art of Character, what would it be?

DC: Oh what a miserable question to ask a writer. To paraphrase Mark Twain: If I’d had more time, I would have made it shorter.

DT: Where do you see your writing going in the future? Would you consider writing another book on craft?

DC: I’ve just completed a new novel, I’m working on a story that is waking me up at nights (a good thing), and I’ve been contacted on a script doctor job by a Hollywood producer. I’m also currently developing two other craft books, one on the connection between character and structure, and the other a deeper examination of rendering characters on the page, with special attention to subtext in emotionally complex scenes.

Christopher Barzak's Before & Afterlives

I first discovered Christopher Barzak a few months before I moved to Korea. A friend of mine mentioned his book The Love We Share Without Knowing which is, among other things, about expatriation in Japan. While Japan is certainly not Korea, I thought it might be nice to get a glimpse at what I was stepping into. And it was beautiful yet painful. Stories of love and loss, tenderness and beauty, all touch by bits of magic, the unreal, the more than real. What struck me most was how perfectly they described what it was like to be a stranger in a country, even when it is your own.

I had previously lived in Ireland, which is much more similar to America than America is to Japan or Korea, but I had felt all these things. The enormous joy, the intense strength of friendships so new, the distance between you and so many others, what it meant to be American, to be American abroad, to be human: Barzak had captured it all in the interweaving stories that make up The Love We Share Without Knowing, and so I could not wait to read his short story collection Before & Afterlives.

It does not disappoint. These are stories published between 1999 and 2011, covering his career, and they are all fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction, but as you read this collection you are reminded how silly genre distinctions are, because why can’t a love story be between a person and a haunted house? Who is to say that the unreal and the real cannot inhabit the same pages? Barzak’s skill here is making a foundation in reality so solid and believable that when the world’s glimmering shifts fantastic you are so swept up in it that it had to be that way. His fiction does not contain magic and monsters to illustrate magic and monsters but to show how beautiful and unknown and haunting our world is.

Reading these seventeen stories that stretch over twelve years we are given an overview of his career, of his concerns as a man. Identity, culture, sexuality, Ohio, rural and suburban youth, family, and always love. I believe love and the transition to adulthood stick out most clearly in his fiction and these are perhaps best captured in “The Language of Moths” and “Maps of Seventeen,” which are two of the longest stories in the collection, and, to me, the most perfect. Burgeoning sexuality, the disconnect of generations, the competitions and barriers that form within families, between siblings, the desire to get away from small town life, the comfort of home, and all the while, just beneath this so real reality, there is a bubbling, a slow rise of magic that shifts everything from a simple story about being a teenager and creates this sublime image of a girl and moths, of a man painting his lover.

While many of these stories traverse similar ground, they are surprisingly varied. There are ghost stories, steampunk adventures, distant future prostitution, surviving an apocalypse, cloning, saving a mermaid, and on and on. There are playful touches, surreal imaginings, harrowing hauntings, and beautiful masterpieces.

To put it short: this is a fantastic collection of fantastic fiction by a man soon to be a household name. His first novel, One for Sorrow, is being made into a film titled Jamie Marks is Dead, and you will know his name, so say it now, write it down, and look for his books. And if you are looking for an overview of Barzak’s writing, start here, with Before & Afterlives.

You will fall in love and it might hurt but it will be glorious.

Compromised Lives of One Sort or Another: A Review of Jen Michalski's Could You Be With Her Now

I doubt that anyone would argue that the two novellas of Could You Be With Her Now are not different stories. I mean, “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” focuses on danger experienced by a mentally challenged fifteen year old, told in his own words. To the contrary, “May-September” omniscient tracks the romance that blooms between much-older woman and the young writer the much-older woman hires to work on her memoir blog.

Sure, these two stories have a relationship (compromised lives of one sort or another) and combine together into an interesting whole. However, there is an impressive range of writing ability between the two.  They are crafted quite differently, function differently, and impact the reader in different ways.

A brief sample from each demonstrates the variance of the two prose styles. Contrast the following “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” sample:

I watch the TV for my girlfriend Megan. She’s fourteen and I am fifteen and every day she’s on the show that I watch about her. She’s pretty and I wish we could hold hands and kiss. My brother Josh is seventeen and doesn’t play with me and doesn’t like Megan. His girlfriend is not on TV and she’s not pretty. Josh and his girlfriend call me retard and laugh. My name is Jimmy but I laugh too.

with the following “May-September” excerpt:

In the living room Sandra found the sheet music, Concerto in F by Gershwin. For years she had known most music by heart, but the last few years a note would fall out here, there, and she could not find it, would stop playing and begin again, only to drop a note someplace else. She began to forget entire songs altogether. Sometimes she could not reach quickly enough to the high notes or the lower notes, and her soles hurt when she pressed on the foot pedals. She had had enemies in her life, surely everyone did. But she hadn’t expected her hands or her piano to turn against her.

Obviously, the prose of “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” is much simpler than that of  “May-September.” It has to be, since the former is told through the voice of mentally challenged Jimmy whereas the latter alternates between the heads of the older woman, Sandra, and the young writer, Alice. Regardless, I was impressed by the prose difference between these two novellas. For me, this was a significant part of the joy of reading the book.

Of course, variety in prose style is not the only aspect in play in these two pieces. As I mentioned, they operate differently, though both in ways that I enjoyed.

“I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” seems to function by contrasting the innocence of Jimmy’s voice with what the reader understands about Jimmy’s situation. Jimmy is a good kid, but there are bad things around him (or involving him) that he cannot understand:

I am on the deck now. I want to hug her goodbye. She pushes at me.

“Get away, you retard!” She screams and I put my hand on her mouth.

Megan bites my hand. I push her away. She is smaller than me and falls against the glass door. I feel bad and put my arms around her to pick her up. We are up half the way. She hits me in the chest and the face. I get mad like I get when Josh hits me and leaves marks. She hits me in the face again and it hurts bad. I put my hands on her neck and twist real hard, back and forth. She puts her hands on my hands but I am bigger. Her face turns all red and it’s kind of funny how red. She keeps moving and kicking and I try to stop her. We are up half the way when she falls asleep on me. She is so heavy I let her fall and then I wait for her to stop make-believing because people on TV are always doing make-believe. The way Josh fake sleeps until I go away.

We understand, but we know that Jimmy does not. This creates an amazing amount of tension despite Jimmy’s pleasant and simple talking. We want to yell to Jimmy to protect him, but he couldn’t understand us anyway.

On the other hand, “May-September” waves back and forth between Sandra and Alice, between their past and their present:

Oh Sandra, you’re never any fun. Georgi got in on the passenger side, pulled on the radio knob. Do you know the way to San Jose, I’ve been away so long. Come to Bali without Jack. We can do girl stuff.

Alice met Sandra by the closet. She moved so quickly, from couch to closet, that Sandra dropped the coat.

I’ve got it. Alice threw it onto the couch and then put her arms around Sandra.

Sandra leaned over and cupped Georgi’s right cheek in her left hand, brushed her left cheek with her lips. She could smell Georgi’s hair, her breath.

Sandra, stop. Georgi pushed at her.

Sandra stood stiffly, feeling Alice against her.

The resulting effect is as complex as Sandra’s and Alice’s emotion. Through that slipping between the two lovers, and between their situation and their history, what they feel and how they act against it, the reader gets closer to experiencing life as Sandra and Alice.

Really, I am not sure which story I prefer. “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” crafts Jimmy’s voice marvelously and brings me to the edge of my chair. However, though “May-September” doesn’t have the same simple charm, the more sophisticated story is captivating. I guess I’ll just have to like Could You Be With Her Nowas a whole and not worry which novella is better.