Customer Reviews

Black Glass: Stories (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

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Fowler is probably best known for the novel Sarah Canary (also highly recommended), but it's in her short fiction that this writer's unique and impressive talents shine brightest. All the stories in this collection are outstanding, displaying Fowler's characteristic intelligence, wit, and instinct for organic story structure. If you're daunted by the length and complexity of the title story, skip forward and start with "Contention" -- in just a few pages, this tale of domestic disgruntlement and tabloid sensationalism packs in more sharp humor, observation, imagination and political acuity than most novels. The "Reader's Circle" edition of this book includes an interview with Fowler as well as some less-than-insightful "discussion topics."

I picked up this book as an afterthought. It sounded slipstream and the cover spoke of magic realism.... The cover doesn't do it justice. Fowler is part of the SF community, but none of these stories are strictly science fiction or even speculative fiction. However, they have SF's ability to stand outside and question the norm. Many of the stories address male/female relationships in a daring and forthright manner. Usually, there are a few stories in a collection that fail for me. That's the treasure of anthologies; the author gets another shot at you. But all of these affected me in some way. Bravo! I'm glad that I took the chance on a writer new to me.

We don't have to ask whatever happened to Karen Joy Fowler, because since the relatively early stories collected here she has become one of America's foremost purveyors of literary fiction. But "whatever happened to..." is a recurring theme in many of the stories in this volume, as Fowler explores the unknown or unappreciated women behind the men of history or literature. Great examples of this here are Gulliver's exasperated wife in "The Travails" and Einstein's lost daughter in "Lieserl." The same goes for the anonymous women left behind by war in one of this collection's strongest tales, "Letters from Home." In a different but also widely-used motif, in "Lily Red," "The View from Venus: A Case Study," and "Game Night at the Fox and Goose," Fowler looks at male/female relationships in a very distinct way, via the imperfect biases of both sides. Other winners in this collection include the less personal but more adventurous fantasy/sci-fi of "Black Glass," and "The Brew" (the second of which reminds me of a rather whimsical update on "To Kill a Mockingbird"). The only problem is that many of Fowler's short stories end abruptly before reaching closure on the thematic issues raised by the characters and their relationships, while subversion and social satire pop up occasionally but could be put to much more powerful use. [~doomsdayer520~]