“We crave narrative,” Joe tells us. And the Reader who picks up Arjun Basu’s Waiting for the Man nods: a narrative craver. ECW Press, 2014 “We believe we are uninteresting without a compelling story.” But Joe himself no longer finds his story compelling. The Reader meets Joe when
Alfrida's apartment is crowded. “'I know I’ve got far too much stuff in here,' she said. 'But it’s my parents’ stuff. It’s family furnishings, and I couldn’t let them go.' The story about her parents, the loss of her mother, the other family with whom she visits only half-heartedly after
Jinny has been standing on shifting ground. Expectations are thwarted: these are times of transformation. This was true, too, in "Gravel" and in "Oh What Avails". But there she is: the space in which she is standing shifts both literally and metaphorically. Things have been all-a-shift for some time now.
In playing the game, a girl writes the name of a boy beside her own name, crosses out the letters in common and counts off the various states of being: "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage". This is what matters: her relationship with a man. And, reading it that way, it seems
Have Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird and Ghalib Islam's debut novel met? Were they caught up together in an air-raid shelter, sharing the same transistor radio while the sirens howled? "Maybe it just wasn’t the right time for him to tell the story. Or maybe it doesn’t matter what century
