Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, New South, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Joyland, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. THE AUTHOR: Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the short story collection Black Light, forthcoming from Vintage August 13, 2019, and the novel The Boiling River, forthcoming from Knopf in 2020ish. My two favourites in this collection are Fiddlebacks, and Starlite. These stories bear a closer inspection and I will be giving them a second read. This was an interesting read, one that deserves not to be hurried. Some of the stories border on the bizarre, all are slightly strange, but very, very real. It is our fears and disappointments that she focuses on, not our dreams, aspirations and achievements. The author focuses on the seamier side of life, the bits that happen, but nobody talks about, the bits that are swept under the carpet and glossed over. And just as a black light shows up things not normally visible to the human eye, these are the things that are focused upon in this collection of short stories.ĭon't expect anything cute or heartwarming. Just as these energetic stories fluoresce and glow as they are being read. A black light gives off highly energetic ultraviolet light. MY THOUGHTS: There are a lot of everyday materials that fluoresce or glow when placed under a black light. Black Light contains the type of storytelling that resonates somewhere deep, in the well of memory that repudiates nostalgia.
Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl-sharp-voiced, bitter, and wise. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. But when Bo is driving - even though she's always looking at herself in the rearview or swerving around road trash in case it's a bag of kittens - my anxiety, usually a thrum as steady and constant as my heartbeat, is something I can smother, tamp down, and forget about for a while.ĪBOUT THIS BOOK: With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows-those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. Car wrecks are shattered windshields and jutting bones, the listless highway patrol scooping bits of you and not-you off the asphalt, zipping the whole mess into a bag.
I want a death that comes from the inside, something I won't have to watch as it's happening - a clot turned loose in my brain, a glossy organ seizing up and shuddering in secret. Whether I'm driving or riding, I can't seem to forget that I'm in a little shell,hurtling along. I *loved* reading your take on every story 🖤- Kimberly King Parsons August 19, 2019ĮXCERPT: I'm usually nervous in cars. SIDE NOTE I was uberpleased that Author Parsons liked my review! It's actually more hard for me to imagine her finding the room inside herself to birth two kids! All this life, all these people, you end up feeling like your entire brain is swelling from their bad breath and farts.Īs is my wont, I used the time-honored and very efficient Bryce Method to (re)view the stories as they came over at my blog. It's been a good, solid busy, as you can see if the hard stuff is where your reading needs are right now. This mess of words and ideas is what's kept Author Parsons busy the past twelve or so years.
The whole collection's about the messiness of being alive, the passionlessness of the quotidian, purple cabbage Thai dishes that jumble against red beards, hairy armpits. Like a playlist of stuff you can't remember liking when you were twenty but comes up when you enter the year you turned twenty into YouTube's maw. You might, in fact, prefer solitude on the trip, but by definition, reading is an accompanied silence. The there you're going with Author Parsons is the there that we try hard to deal with each in our separate ways, the there that we hate but need. You know the "there" I mean, that there that Gertrude Stein railed against not being there in Oakland, California, circa 1920. ***NOVEMBER 2019 UPDATE*** This delightful book has unseated the presumptive champion to become my annual six-stars-of-five bestestest read of the year!ĪND it was a 2019 NBA longlister.AND it's in the 2020 Tournament of Books!ĭon't start this read if you're not ready to go there.
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