SHORT STORIES
LIBERATION DAY by George Saunders (Bloomsbury £18.99, 256pp)
LIBERATION DAY
by George Saunders (Bloomsbury £18.99, 256pp)
The nine stories from the Booker prize winning author of Lincoln In The Bardo are a joy. Effortlessly stylish, funny and smart, they come spangled with sadness and a melancholic malaise as Saunders casts an eye over a country teetering towards wreckage.
Wrong choices, compromised consciences, the vacillating mindsets that beset his cleverly realised characters — who range from an angry suburban parent, whose cheerful moral code is challenged (The Mom Of Bold Action) to Brian who’s trapped in a subterranean, hell-themed amusement park, fated to continually reprise a thankless role (Ghoul) — conjure the unruly state of the United States.
The speculative, titular tale sets the tone — dystopian, disruptive and simmering with violence — as an enslaved wall of human ‘speakers’ are confronted with historical home truths and harsh present-day realities in their rich owner’s living room, with tragic consequences.
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THE CONSEQUENCES by Manuel Munoz (Indigo Press £10.99, 208pp) The characte
THE CONSEQUENCES
by Manuel Munoz (Indigo Press £10.99, 208pp)
The characters in Munoz’s tough and tender stories play out lives of complicated familial obligations and hard-scrabble economics in the orchards, bus stations and small apartments of California’s Central Valley as summer sizzles and hearts break.
The subject matter is often sombre — men deported by the immigration authorities, their partners taking long bus journeys to visit them (The Happiest Girl In The Whole USA), harsh betrayals in close-knit communities (Anyone Can Do It), the future of a pregnant teenager (The Reason Is Because) and a sister forever enacting the role of her reckless brother’s rescuer, as he dangerously hooks up with older, careless men (What Kind Of Fool Am I?).
There’s a glow of warmth as Munoz’s compassionate gaze lends grace to these incandescent tales of striving and survival.
A BALLET OF LEPERS: A NOVEL AND STORIES by Leonard Cohen (Canongate £20, 272pp)
A BALLET OF LEPERS: A NOVEL AND STORIES
by Leonard Cohen (Canongate £20, 272pp)
Veering between the grim and the grandiose, the melancholy and the melodramatic, these early fictions from charismatic Leonard Cohen — written between 1956 and 1961 when the singer, songsmith and poet was in his 20s — deal in ecstasy and existential agony with worldweary narrators yearning for an indefinable something.
The books opens with the brutal A Ballet Of Lepers, a tale of toxic relationships, violence and released fury, and proceeds with 15 short stories and a radio play where the women are hastily drawn archetypes and the men are, for the most part, introspective, unhappy and brewing bitterness.
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