The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology 2

4/5 ( ratings)

Fiction from the pages of The Brooklyn Rail. Edited by Brooklyn Rail Fiction editor Donald Breckenridge. With editorial assistance from Jen Zoble, Stefanie Sobelle, and Claudia Acevedo. Introduction by Albert Mobilio.

featuring work from
Eugene Ionesco | Emmanuel Bove | Valeria Parella | Lewis Warsh | Saadat Hasan Manto | Akutagawa Ryonosuke | Christine Schutt | Diane Williams | Julio Cortazar | Fernando Pessoa | Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud | Marquis de Sade | Dawn Raffel | Douglas Glover | Mario Benedetti | Charles Bukowski | Laird Hunt | Shelley Jackson | Fatima Yousef | Victor Hugo Viscarra | Tom Motley | Anatoly Gabrilov | Gilbert Sorrentino | Robert Walser | Luc Lang | Richard Kostelanetz | Johannah Rodgers

from PW
This prodigious anthology from the monthly journal embodies the duality of its title: it implies a place of origin, but also suggests a journey. Expectedly, the eclectic collection features many works in translation by authors from countries as far flung as Japan, India, Uruguay, and Kuwait, and representing an equally diverse selection of styles including plays, modern short stories, and a post-modern comic entitled "Tragic Strips." Editor Breckenridge favors the non-traditional, like the surreal screenplay ‘The Hardboiled Egg" by Eugéne Ionesco. Marquis de Sade makes an appearance with an excerpt from a philosophical novel and Charles Bukowski with a quietly introspective piece about a man selling his classical record collection to a pair of nuns. These classics come among alongside an assortment of perfectly-crafted stories from innovative contemporary American writers Laird Hunt, Dawn Raffel, Douglas Glover, and Shelley Jackson, ensuring the journey is replete with unexpected twists and turns, and plenty of food for thought, along the way. There is no cohesive theme to bind this miscellaneous collection of fiction, and perhaps that is the point. At the start of each story, the reader wonders where they will be taken next, and the journey is always thought-provoking.