Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle (152 pages; Graywolf Press) is a story collection of intertwining vignettes, a series of experimental narratives that speak to the vulnerability of being female and the roles women are expected to play in a male-dominant world. Steinberg does not cast a rosy hue over her portrayal of society. She writes her truth—her female narrators’ truth—and makes no attempt to censor it. The narrators’ voices blend together, as do the male characters: lovers, fathers, and brothers move in and out of one another until they become indistinguishable. The opening story, “Superstar,” tells of a woman who breaks into […]
Contributor: Miranda Morgan
The Story Is All That We Are: Percival Everett’s ‘Percival Everett By Virgil Russell’
by Miranda Morgan
Percival Everett By Virgil Russell by Percival Everett proves to be exactly what the title advertises; a novel that teases the reader with the identity of the narrator until the last page and even then, we are left wondering. The book opens with a conversation in a nursing home between a dying father and his son, presumably based on Percival Everett and his own father, a final attempt to connect and salvage a relationship weakened by time spent apart. The character of the father begins by telling his son he is going to read his writing aloud. “And I’ve written […]