Customer Reviews

Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings

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It's possible to feel one is wandering in a cold, mathematical wasteland when reading stories by contemporary writers. How nice to find an anthology of stories that are engaging, provocative, and not completely self-absorbed. Ok, a couple of the writers in the book are self-absorbed, but there are stories by all sorts of other authors, some I'd heard of, some I hadn't, that made me laugh, worry, think about the world, and want to pass the book on. In a literary world where either sullen math or indulgent memoir (or a combination of the two) seems to rule, Juncture is a welcome oddity - you'll think about some of the stories for days and days afterwards and not be pissed off as I usually am.

Stapleton and Gonzales have done an excellent job crafting an anthology that is both eclectic and coherent; these stories feel like they belong together, and yet each story seems surprising and highly individual. I was eager to read ahead, to see what unexpected turn the collection would take next. The anthology as a whole feels vital and risky--these writers are nothing if not linguistic virtuosos, and like the jazz riffs and subversive dance beats on the CD that was cut to accompany this book, these stories pulse with immediacy, a sense of urgency that is all too often lacking in contemporary short fiction.