Publishers Weekly - 02.03.2020

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Review_FICTION

brings them to scintillating life. (May)

Amora
Natalia Borges Polesso, trans. from the
Portuguese by Julia Sanches. Amazon Crossing,
$19.95 (234p) ISBN 978-1-5420-0433-6
Polesso’s bittersweet collection (after
Control) explores the highs and lows of life
for a series of Brazilian lesbians. In “My
Cousin’s in Town,” an unnamed narrator
invites her co-workers over for dinner, and
when her girlfriend, Bruna—who was
supposed to be traveling—comes out of
their bathroom wrapped in a towel, the
narrator introduces Bruna as a cousin to
keep her sexual identity a secret. In
“Dreaming,” Raquel, a businesswoman
whose friends find her “shockingly tedious,”
stuns them with a story from her time
living in San Francisco in her 20s, when,
naked and drunk during a house party,
she sneaked into a celebrity’s pool and
hooked up with a “blonde, leggy, tanned”
woman with “surfer’s cheeks.” “Renfield’s
Demons” tells the gut-punching story of
Débora, who comes home unexpectedly
and finds her partner, Moira, entangled
with another woman on the living room
floor. A week later, to combat her depres-
sion, Débora goes to a costume party
where she has sex with a woman dressed
as a vampire, who draws real blood when
she bites. With brevity, abstraction, and
narrative tension, Polesso offers a poignant
look at women alternately broken down
and resilient. Fans of Lucia Berlin will
love these tense and twisty tales. (May)

Vanishing Monuments
John Elizabeth Stintzi. Arsenal Pulp, $17.95
trade paper (304p) ISBN 978-1-55152-801-4
In Stintzi’s ambitious debut novel (after
the poetry collection Junebat) a nonbinary
photographer based in Minneapolis
struggles to break through the barriers of
their past. The photographer, Alani Baum,
navigates their “memory palace” after their
mother’s dementia takes a turn for the

worse and they return to their childhood

home in Winnipeg for the first time in 30

years. The components of the palace guide

the narrative through collaged passages that

examine the space’s fixed points. Chapters

titled “The Living Room” and “The Stairs”

open on scenes narrated in the second

person, bringing the reader into rooms

where walls are “covered in memories.”

Stintzi ties Alani’s troubled history with

their mother to readings of Ovid, descrip-

tions of photographs, and past travels

from the narrator’s life that reach as far as

Hamburg, where Alani worked as a model

for photographer Erwin Egger. Certain

moments stand out vividly—a description

of Alani navigating their nonbinary iden-

tity through the metaphor of a labyrinth

and a Minotaur, the detailed construction

of Erwin’s photographic compositions—

but they don’t all cohere in the long run.

Still, Stintzi’s skill shines through in well-

crafted sentences and narratives. Despite

its weaknesses, Stintzi’s first foray into the

novel form displays a visionary approach

with the refreshing touch of a poet. (May)

The Narcissism of Small Differences

Michael Zadoorian. Akashic, $28.95 (304p)

ISBN 978-1-61775-825-1

Zadoorian (The Leisure Seeker) serves up

a wry, unflinching tale of an underachieving

couple in midlife crisis mode as the

recession grips the industrial Midwest.

Joe and Ana live in Ferndale, Mich., a

mile outside Detroit, where they’ve been

shacked up (but not married) for 15 years.

Joe’s a freelance journalist just getting by,

Danny Adams

Nicolas Amara

Allen Appel

Chris Barsanti

Judy Bates

Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf

Vicki Borah Bloom

Mitzi Brunsdale

Charlene Brusso

Lynda Brill Comerford

Jessica Daitch

Dave DeChristopher

John diBello

Bryan Dumas

Stefan Dziemianowicz

Rebecca George

Daphne Grab

Sara Grochowski

Patricia Guy

Don Herron

Jon Jeffryes

Justin Jeffryes

Mary M. Jones

Michael M. Jones

Juliet Kahn

Jasmina Kelemen

Cheryl Klein

Tom Krabacher

Pam Lambert

Diane Langhorst

Cody Lee

Nicholas Litchfield

Heidi MacDonald

Patty MacDonald

Amy Magnus

Clare Mao

Peter McPherson

Sheri Melnick

Elizabeth Morse

Albert Municino

Julie Naughton

Eric Norton

Dionne Obeso

Robert Allen Papinchak

Leonard Picker

Diane Reynolds

Roger Reynolds

Ingrid Roper

Carliann Rittman

Joseph L. Sanders

Antonia Saxon

Martha Schulman

Michael Seidlinger

Kira Sexton

Jeffrey Weaver

Kathy Weeks

Erica Wetter

Rona Wilk

Benjamin Woodard

Eris Young

Maryelizabeth Yturralde

Our Reviewers

▲

★ The Vanishing Half

Brit Bennett. Riverhead, $27 (352p) ISBN 978-0-525-53629-1

B

ennett (The Mothers) explores a Louisiana family’s

navigation of race, from the Jim Crow era through

the 1980s, in this impressive work. The Vignes

twins, Desiree and Stella, were born and raised in

Mallard, La., the slave-born founder of which imagined

a town with “each generation lighter than the one before.”

In the early 1940s, when the twins are little, they witness

their father’s lynching, and as they come of age, they

harbor ambitions to get out. Desiree, the more headstrong

sister, leads Stella to New Orleans when they are 16,

and after a few months, the quiet, studious Stella, who

once dreamt of enrolling in an HBCU, disappears one

night. In 1968, 14 years later, still with no word from Stella, Desiree is back in

Mallard with her eight-year-old daughter, Jude, having left her abusive ex-husband.

When Jude is older, she makes her own escape from Mallard to attend college in

Los Angeles. At a party, Jude glimpses a woman who looks exactly like Desiree—

except she couldn’t be, because this woman is white. Eventually, the Vignes twins

reunite, reckoning with the decisions that have shaped their lives. Effortlessly

switching between the voices of Desiree, Stella, and their daughters, Bennett

renders her characters and their struggles with great compassion, and explores

the complicated state of mind that Stella finds herself in while passing as white.

This prodigious follow-up surpasses Bennett’s formidable debut. (June)