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Short and smart (continued)




In his debut collection, The Task of This Translator (Harvest, 272 pages, $13), Todd Hasak-Lowy attempts to walk the line where the personal fuses with the universal. The collection’s seven sharp and timely stories quietly (and not so quietly) critique American culture, confronting global issues through their characters’ individual breakdowns. "On the Grounds of the Complex Commemorating the Nazis’ Treatment of the Jews" features a down-on-his-luck journalist working the snack shop at Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust museum. A stale pastry ignites a fight between the cashier and an American tourist that reveals much about American-Israeli relations. In the title story, an unqualified sluggard gets the job of translating between two families reuniting after a brutal division. And there’s some postmodern posturing in "The End of Larry’s Wallet," in which a wallet is misplaced against the background of an unfolding nuclear disaster involving India and Pakistan. Hasak-Lowy will read from The Task of This Translator on July 13 at Newtonville Books.

David Bezmozgis was born in Latvia and moved to Toronto with his parents when he was seven years old. He released his debut collection, Natasha (Picador, 147 pages, $12), last year to huge critical acclaim and all sorts of prizes and best lists. It’s just now out in paperback. The interconnected stories explore one Latvian family’s acclimation to life in 1980s Toronto. But the stories in Natasha rise well above the émigré-fiction label; each story stands confidently on its own. Sixteen-year-old Mark Berman (through whose eyes all the stories are told) narrates the title story about the arrival of a Russian bride for his uncle, "the latest in a string of last chances," and the potent, experienced 14-year-old daughter she brings with her. Every character in the story — from the wise-for-her-years Natasha to the bourgeois-philosopher pot dealer Rufus to the weak but genius uncle — is fully drawn, and Bezmozgis’s prose is clean and strong and true throughout.

WHILE THE authors discussed above are all relative newcomers, the ones featured in the forthcoming anthology The Paris Review Book of People with Problems (Picador, 400 pages, $15) are firmly established. Many, as you’d expect in a collection drawn from the behemoth of literary magazines, are masters of the trade. The anthology includes a selection of more than 30 years’ worth of stories from the Paris Review, each propelled by people with problems. In Rick Bass’s "The Hermit’s Story," told in typical sparse and sinewy style, a man and woman unexpectedly find shelter under the surface of a frozen lake during a snowstorm. There’s an of-the-moment naturalness mixed with the macabre in Miranda July’s optimistic "Birthmark," a rapid tale of a woman with and without a birthmark on her face. And in Charles Baxter’s "Westland," a man encounters the type of girl every father is afraid to have. The anthology also includes stories by Annie Proulx, Denis Johnson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Ben Okri, and Wells Tower.

Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, 281 pages, $14.95) is another anthology. It’s not fiction, but it’s written mostly by young fiction writers. According to the book’s cover blurb, Bookmark Now is a "collection of all original essays from today’s (and tomorrow’s) young authors on the state of the art — and the art of the hustle — in the age of information overload." The book asks: what’s the relevance of literature in this day and age? A compelling question for sure, if not always so compellingly answered by the likes of Neal Pollack, Nell Freudenberger, Glen David Gold, and Tara Bray Smith. One of the strongest essays is "Distractions," by God Lives in St. Petersburg author Tom Bissel. He writes about his penchant for video games and comic books, mixing discussions of Frogger, the X-Men, and Space Invaders with arguments about how all the distractions these days "are creating a culture literally afraid of interiority." Some of these essays tend toward the arch, but their thought-provoking subject emphasizes the timeless importance of storytelling.

Nina MacLaughlin can be reached at nmaclaughlin[a]phx.com.

 

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Issue Date: June 24 - 30, 2005
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