Casey C

Bender ... lingers in the experiences of her characters rather than bothering with scientific or rational explanations. But to place the novel in the genre of magical realism is to exaggerate the scale of Bender's project and to distract from the very realist depiction of family and food that she has created. Bender takes a magical premise and makes a real story out of it: Rose's coming-of-age narrative unfolds alongside several other smaller, though related, stories of love, and a larger but mo

It's as if Lynch has captured the constant vigilance and abiding presence of his professional life as a funeral director in his written words. When so many fiction writers crowd their stories and novels with hundreds of characters and thousands of extraneous details, it's calming to settle into Lynch's rich, tightly focused narratives... The old and the new, the living and the dead: this collection of short stories is a trove of carefully observed lives. If you're drawn to quiet, moving portrait