Dazzling short stories from a prizewinning young author, whose smart but vulnerable heroines -- from an apprentice dominatrix in over her head, to a spurned wife explaining her husband's flaws to his mother, to a stripper who turns the tables on her customers -- get in all kinds of trouble and have to dig themselves out with brains and nerve.
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In the title story from Jana Martin's debut collection, a young divorcée settles in to compose a letter to her former mother-in-law. Through several drafts, she lets her mind and mood wander from sorry (about hurling serving dishes at the wall at Christmas dinner) to not-quite-over-it (does mom know her son's a cheating, passionless ass?) to kinda over it (an affair with the half-Jamaican hunk down the hall is good medicine). When it's not slyly funny -- she encloses a check to cover the cost of cleaning gravy off of the wallpaper -- "Russian Lover" is gutpunchingly painful, written from a place of genuine heartbreak. That story alone is worth the price of admission, but Martin has a few more tricks. One story's arranged like definitions but reads like word association; another is so clipped you can practically hear the clock ticking between each sentence fragment. Most of the protagonists are sharp but snakebitten women: strippers, junkies, a dominatrix-in-training, sufferers of unknown and comical ailments. Precise, succinct language keeps the reader in the moment and unprepared for a subtle evolution into the fantastic. In other words: You buy it long before you know you're being sold something. But not so much because Martin's a sweet talker; with prose so forthright and deliberate it's easy to believe you're in the hands of a straight shooter. That's what makes it so surprising, so captivating, when you suddenly realize she's been pulling a fast one on you. --Patrick Rapa, Philadelphia City Paper
The excellent arts journal Yeti is branching into book publishing, and "Russian Lover," a collection of stories about tough-yet-fragile women drifting into new cities, is Yeti's first title. Martin, who grew up partly in Boston, employs the city in much the same way that midcentury, live-action Disney movies used to: as a repressive place that you must leave if you want to be happy and fulfilled. In "Hope," the protagonist abandons her lousy Boston apartment and her boyfriend ("a pseudo rocker in smallbutt jeans"), and leaves "that bleak northern city" on a bus headed for Florida. Buy a copy to read at the beach; you will not be disappointed. --Joshua Glenn, Boston Globe
In opening story "Hope," which won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers in 1999, a woman hooked on heroin boards a Greyhound from Boston to Florida, leaving her loser ex-boyfriend behind. The impetus is a bad infection from a dirty needle, but the reader slowly gets the impression there s more to the story than the standard junkie-on-the-mend motif. The character's old-fashioned father arrives in the story via phone calls and memories, and one wonders which of the two is more sad. In "Why I Got Fired," a stripper runs through a litany of abuses, including harassment from her landlord, a police officer and countless paying customers. The story begins with her at 19, giving a lap dance to a guy who s unzipped his pants. In a poetic, real-time voice, the narrator reacts: "Jumping off the rude guy and clocking him in the jaw." After leaving Cleveland for a new city five years later, she has to put up with more of the same. Only this time, her reaction is fiercer: "Glorious hands out and waiting for a man's naked silly neck and yelling This one's for Cleveland." Many of the women similarly toe the line between tough and vulnerable, endearingly troubled troublemakers. Rather than a single action or decision forging the conflict of the stories, the characters' entire lives up until the moment of the story serve as the driving force. When we tell Martin she seems to have a curious affection for, and interest in, damaged women, she bristles at our word choice. "I think of them as girls on the lam," she says. "Damaged implies a type of psychological state to me. But these are girls in desperate situations. Certainly they re in dire straits that they haven't quite figured out how to fix. But they re trying to fix it." --Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
The excellent arts journal Yeti is branching into book publishing, and "Russian Lover," a collection of stories about tough-yet-fragile women drifting into new cities, is Yeti's first title. Martin, who grew up partly in Boston, employs the city in much the same way that midcentury, live-action Disney movies used to: as a repressive place that you must leave if you want to be happy and fulfilled. In "Hope," the protagonist abandons her lousy Boston apartment and her boyfriend ("a pseudo rocker in smallbutt jeans"), and leaves "that bleak northern city" on a bus headed for Florida. Buy a copy to read at the beach; you will not be disappointed. --Joshua Glenn, Boston Globe
In opening story "Hope," which won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers in 1999, a woman hooked on heroin boards a Greyhound from Boston to Florida, leaving her loser ex-boyfriend behind. The impetus is a bad infection from a dirty needle, but the reader slowly gets the impression there s more to the story than the standard junkie-on-the-mend motif. The character's old-fashioned father arrives in the story via phone calls and memories, and one wonders which of the two is more sad. In "Why I Got Fired," a stripper runs through a litany of abuses, including harassment from her landlord, a police officer and countless paying customers. The story begins with her at 19, giving a lap dance to a guy who s unzipped his pants. In a poetic, real-time voice, the narrator reacts: "Jumping off the rude guy and clocking him in the jaw." After leaving Cleveland for a new city five years later, she has to put up with more of the same. Only this time, her reaction is fiercer: "Glorious hands out and waiting for a man's naked silly neck and yelling This one's for Cleveland." Many of the women similarly toe the line between tough and vulnerable, endearingly troubled troublemakers. Rather than a single action or decision forging the conflict of the stories, the characters' entire lives up until the moment of the story serve as the driving force. When we tell Martin she seems to have a curious affection for, and interest in, damaged women, she bristles at our word choice. "I think of them as girls on the lam," she says. "Damaged implies a type of psychological state to me. But these are girls in desperate situations. Certainly they re in dire straits that they haven't quite figured out how to fix. But they re trying to fix it." --Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
About the Author
Jana Martin grew up in New Jersey, Boston, and New York City, graduated from Oberlin College, and received an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. Her story "Hope" won a Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, and her work has also appeared in Five Points, Spork, Willow Springs, Yeti, and other journals. Jana is a regular contributor to Yeti and to sporkpress.com, which hosts her fiction column, is mink hollow. She lives in Woodstock, New York.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Stories by a Great Literary Stylist,
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This review is from: Russian Lover and Other Stories (Paperback)
I loved this collection of short stories. Jana Martin is a literary stylist, which means that her stories are less about plot than they are about character and, perhaps even more importantly, the language used. Each word choice is perfect and resonant. There's a strong sexual undercurrent that runs through many of the stories in this collection, replaced only occasionally by an equally strong sense of nostalgia for family life, and almost always told from a female POV. There's a great deal of humor pulsing under the skin, too. If you like well written literary fiction, you should definitely check this one out.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
excellent read,
By N. Simian (NYC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Russian Lover and Other Stories (Paperback)
Sharp prose, comical timing, strange and evocative emotional landscapes presented in these not-so-simple simple stories, the cumulative effect of which resonates long after you finish reading them. I look forward to Ms. Martin's next book.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterful,
By
This review is from: Russian Lover and Other Stories (Paperback)
At their worst, the stories read like chick-lit for the suicide girl set. At their best, they recall Flannery O' Connor and Tennessee Williams. A great capture of American zeitgeist in the last days of superpowerdom.Clearly, the collection spans at least a decade of Jana Martin's writing. I think she'll only get better. I would look forward to a novel from any of these short stories. My favorites are: Why I Got Fired, Goodbye John Denver and the title track (if you will) Russian Lover.
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