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“The Science of Lost Futures” book review

Mark Twain famously wrote that “truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities.” It is as if Ryan Habermeyer, author of the BOA Short Fiction Prize-winning collection of stories The Science of Lost Futures, took this as a personal challenge. Habermeyer does not bother to stick to realistic possibilities, opting instead to stretch our capacity of acceptance.

Part fantasy satire and part sci-fi fairytale, the stories in this collection are, at face value, completely absurd. A giant foot washes ashore near a small town; a woman’s womb falls out of her body and proceeds to flop and squeal around the house; a mother contracts a rare disease that makes her think she’s a snow leopard; a boy adopts a pet Nazi. Twain himself would have to admit that reality can’t compete with such strangeness. Despite the hilarity of the stories, they are not absurd for absurdity’s sake—the outlandish premises provide emotionally subversive juxtapositions…

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Book Review: ME by Tomoyuki Hoshino

“The title of Tomoyuki Hoshino’s new novel comes from a common hustle in Japan called the “me-me scam,” whereby a con artist calls an elderly person and only identifies himself by saying, “It’s me.” The victim, believing that they are talking to someone they know, is then swindled into sending money to the perpetrator, who claims to have gotten into financial difficulty. Scammers in Japan collectively extract $400 million every year from unsuspecting victims in this way.

ME begins with a similar scam, yet it transforms from a simple act of petty crime into an exploration of identity and individualism in a modern corporatized society. Hoshino, who writes both fiction and nonfiction, has won several major Japanese awards and had a number of his works translated into English. ME, first published in Japan in 2010, has now been translated as a result of winning the Kenzaburō Ōe Prize, named for the Nobel-winning Japanese author…”

 

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Book Review: “The Gustav Sonata” by Rose Tremain

On his first day in his new kindergarten class in small-town Switzerland, Anton Zwiebel can do nothing but weep uncontrollably. The teacher tries to console him, but Anton is helpless, carried off by the inertia of his emotions. She pairs him off with a friendless boy, Gustav Perle, whose first words to Anton are: “My mother says it’s better not to cry. She says you have to master yourself.” Anton immediately stops crying. This exchange, where the ever-caring Gustav stabilizes the torrentially emotional Anton, will come to define their relationship.

The story of Gustav and Anton as children in the years immediately following World War II composes the first of three movements in Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata. Part Two traces the pre- and mid-war relationship of Gustav’s parents, while Part Three moves fifty years into the future to see the final crescendo of Gustav and Anton. Despite the different times and historical contexts, Tremain, winner of numerous awards, including the Whitbread Award, the Orange Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, skillfully investigates the philosophical implications and human costs of neutrality…”

 

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