At the end of Jeffrey Lent’s Before We Sleep, Katey Snow must call her mother. She’s spent an eventful week on the road, having taken her father’s truck on an extended sojourn from Vermont to Virginia, but her imperative is to speak to her mother, from whom she had a fraught departure. The two characters, Katey and her mother Ruth, carry this graceful novel, and have alternating chapters named for each in turn. In Mr. Lent’s usual style, their stories unfold at an even pace, their revelations...
July 14, 2018
"The Water Diviner and Other Stories" by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer
New author Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer won the 2018 Iowa Short Fiction Award by hewing close to the theme of the culture shock experienced by immigrants to the United States from Sri Lanka. In “The Water Diviner and Other Stories,” these uprooted people react and adjust - or fail to adjust - in a wide variety of ways to the strange American customs and culture. Their stories are told in effective and unadorned language; the emotions and tensions are plainly depicted, sometimes lurking below...
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