Review by Booklist Review
In this collection of short stories, Ives (Loudermilk, 2019) time travels, hallucinates, and performs magic to speak about the mystical qualities of the mundane. The stories all meander into something unexpected before exploding in truth and keen observations of human nature. In one piece, a yuppie friend (human, girl) is married to an actual demon from the underworld. Another story juxtaposes quantum physics with murder-mystery team-building activities. A third follows a woman out of her home at the bottom of the ocean to play some dry-land tennis. There's a story called "The Care Bears Find and Kill God," and an imagined Wikipedia entry for the colloquial term guys. The pieces vary in form and self-awareness; Ives' cultural criticism is often a character, sometimes even the narrator, in these tales. High-art culture, late capitalism, and early marriage are some of the most commonly skewered themes. Ives has the rare ability to boomerang reality totally out of whack before calling it home in an even purer form.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ives (Loudermilk) grapples with information overload while exploring her characters' deeply personal interiority in this inventive collection. Here, Mallarmé meets Craigslist, as a young translator takes a job writing the diaries of erotic online models in "A Throw of the Dice," a reference to the symbolist poet's magnum opus. In "Recognition of This World Is Not the Invention of It," a retreat for coworkers leads to a game of Murder, and then takes on additional layers of darkness as the narrator reflects on her fraught relationship with her mother and contemplates suicide. The narrator of the title story considers Gottfried Leibniz's theory of monads (the building blocks of the universe) while semi-dating an angel who works for an IT company. The fascinating, dialogue-heavy "Scary Sites" surfs between many topics, from Saturday Night Live to violence in literature, to Sarah Huckabee Sanders's "Perfect Smoky Eye." The structurally ingenious "Guy" takes the form of a casual stroll through Wikipedia's hodgepodge of entries on Guy Fawkes and the Napoleonic Wars before settling into a startlingly intimate portrait of an affair. Through juxtaposition and collage, these stories illuminate the trickier fringes of life right now. Agent: Chris Clemans, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A dozen improvisatory narratives from a mind that just won't stop. Art critic and author Ives offers a series of impossibly clever riffs on familiar features of modern life. Her two novels, Impossible Views of the World (2017) and Loudermilk (2019), embraced a wider audience, but the current collection is on the esoteric side, with plot and character serving mainly as carriers for intellectual humor and existential riffs. The title story, "Cosmogony," begins with characteristic élan: "A few years ago a friend of mine married a demon....The demon's name was Fulmious Mannerhorn Patterlully, and he was approximately 200,001 years old." FMP, as the narrator refers to him, has an "occult understanding of the stock market, [an] ability to produce fire on demand," and a long-standing social network. Sometime after the wedding, the narrator runs into FMP in the grocery store: "He reels off her credit score, social security number, and the date on which [she] is currently scheduled to die." Soon after, she begins dating an angel named Eric. Things don't go well for either couple. Whether you get it or not (we didn't), it's still pretty amusing. Other stories include the confessions of a woman who gets a job writing fake diaries for porn actresses; a very long Wikipedia entry for the word guy, with all the usual sections and 45 fictional references; a running joke about mistaking a book titled "Better Tennis" for "bitter tennis"; a dizzying confection that whips together the parlor game Murder, mathematical formulas, suicidal ideation, a lot of partying, and the author's mother's unusual hobby. The Care Bears, Louise Nevelson, Mallarmé, a bodega cat named Ersatz Panda...everything a grad student in semiotics could dream of is here. Very far over some readers' heads lies the sweetest of spots for others. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
