Customer Reviews

Best New American Voices 2010

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My impression of the sort of writing that comes from writing programs was not good. I expected a lot of sameness, writers who sound alike. I got wonderful stories, each one written with a unique voice. This is the best collection I've read in years. I was particularly impressed by:

"Bethlehem Is Full" by Boomer Pinches, which begins with this startling opening line, "The abortion went well and there was no need to postpone their trip to Australia." The story doesn't go as expected, and the surprise ending is a heart-stopper.

"Lizard Man" by David James Poissant, a story about a man who finds out his son is gay and in defiance of the contemporary Hollywood cliché does not think it's cool. Growth happens through a strange adventure with an alligator.

I loved "Cape Town" by Claire O'Connor, the story of a 50 year-old cancer patient who travels with her adult daughter to South Africa, where they swim with sharks. Beautiful.

"Plato" by Timothy Scott is the story of a man coping with his wife's suicide, while developing a relationship with a young novitiate. I'm still thinking about its enigmatic ending.

My favorite, and the only fantasy, story in the collection is "Horusville" by Christian Moody. In Horusville, the trees have eyes. The POV character is a thirteen year-old boy artist in love with his art teacher, who also happens to be his older brother's fiancé. This sentence gives an example of Moody's high-octane prose, "Miss Mahogany, small as she was--and old, too, with wrinkled skin the same burnished red brown of her name--would beat such would-be book thieves so mercilessly with her yardstick that the pyrotechnic scarves holding her braids together would fly off, and then her hair would whip about so fiercely, all snakelike and crazy, that you could imagine the poor recipient of her wrath mistaking her yardstick's crack for the snap of poisoned fangs."

I was happy to Laura van den berg's "Up High in the Air." It also appeared in her debut collection, What the world will look like when all the water leaves us, which I reviewed last year. I gave it five stars.