Her entry begins:The book I finished most recently is Tania James's incredible new novel The Tusk that Did the Damage. I have been a fan of James's fiction for a while and was delighted to find this new book. It's set in rural India and it tells the story of a rogue elephant, one that has taken to attacking human beings, and the people who are drawn into the drama created by these attacks. It's structured as a braided narrative and it uses two first-person narrators, an American documentary maker who has come to India to make a film about ivory poaching and a local villager whose cousin is killed by the elephant known as "The Gravedigger". Their stories are...[read on]About Viral: Stories, from the publisher:
A dazzling collection of stories about how the familiar can suddenly turn strange.Visit Emily Mitchell's website.
A guidebook introduces foreign visitors to a recognizable but dreamlike America, where mirrors are haunted and the Statue of Liberty wears a bowler hat.A department-store supervisor must discipline employees who don’t smile enough at customers, but finds himself unexpectedly drawn to the saddest of them all. A woman reluctantly agrees to buy her daughter a robot pet, then is horrified when her little girl chooses an enormous mechanical spider for a companion. The characters in these stories find that the world they thought they knew has shifted and changed, become bizarre and disorienting, and, occasionally, miraculous. Told with absurdist humor and sweet sadness, Viral is about being lost in places that are supposed to feel like home.
Writers Read: Emily Mitchell.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
