STRUGGLES ON THE PERIPHERY: PROFUNDITY IN THE EVERYDAY – FICTION
Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s False War: A Novel, translated by Natasha Wimmer, portrays ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country. Álvarez links extraordinary stories of ordinary people from Havana to Berlin – barbers and dissidents, thieves and chess players – each immersed in a fake war waged with little real passion. In Robert Busby’s Bodock: Stories, an ice storm hits the fictional titular Mississippi town, leaving lives and landscapes fractured. From two siblings surveying their family’s damaged orchard and a cop mourning his son to a divorced slacker aiding in his former father-in-law’s lung transplant surgery, Busby’s stories traverse time and dimensions to surface the struggles of the everyday. In Detonator: Stories, Peter Mountford sets his characters not at the center of historical events, but at their peripheries – witnesses to momentous changes they can only partially comprehend, including widely disparate circumstances such as the early 1980s onset of Sri Lanka’s civil war and Ecuador’s post-revolution economy. Rather than rendering them insignificant, this perspective reveals their profound humanity.
Buy False War: A Novel – Álvarez
Buy Detonator: Stories – Mountford
