In “Madeline’s Birthday”, the sadness slips to the background, like it does in an Elizabeth Taylor story, with a hint of darkness besides. Madeline is a guest in the Tracy family’s summer home, and her seventeenth birthday affects every resident. Readers briefly inhabit the perspective of most inhabitants (even
The widow has let her hair go. It is half mahogany and half dull grey. Not only grey, but dull grey. Paola and Renata's listening that summer One has the sense that being a widow might have brought this about. The simple act of inhabiting widowhood. But that
Walter is just a kid, in comparison to the elderly widows with whom he spends most of his time. And perhaps when he's driving his sporty little Singer, he's not thinking about ending things. But in quiet moments, despair sneaks up on him. Promenade des anglais, Nice, 1960
In another collection, this story is called "One Morning in May", and I wonder if anyone thought about renaming it "The Other Menton". For as surely as the title story takes a young woman's expectations of Paris and examines how they conflict with her real experience of the city, this
The title of her second novel might well have been a discarded option for her debut; Riel Nason is back in familiar territory: the intersection between memory and identity, the line between mysticism and madness, and sibling bonds in a coming-of-age tale. Goose Lane, 2016 Now it is 1977
