Stories From Japan Anchored In-Site To The US-Mexico Border


IF WE WERE ELSEWHERE
stories
by Wendy J. Fox
183 p. Santa Fe Writers Project. Paper, $15.95.

This deeply connected collection follows a constellation of coworkers at a small Denver company, starting out, eventual layoffs during a market downturn, and beyond. These are far from your typical corporate flats. An artist takes a job seeking a stable salary and independence from her exploitative boyfriend. A hippie leaves his family and becomes a commune to join the capitalist, bureaucratic society. A spreadsheet-loving data analyst tries to draw the limits of her courage and happiness. A workaholic executive tracks down his lost marriage as well as the downfall of his company.

In this book, Fox asks what makes a life meaningful. Each story adapts to a crisis moment when the characters are caught between their current lives and a risky way out. A data analyst is forced to choose between her husband and a man she met at a party and starts a delicious relationship. The young artist must choose between her artist boyfriend and colleague, someone who reflects her importance or someone who simply enjoys her company. The hippie must choose between a safe, traditional corporate life and the gravitational pull of the home, where people live in hollow buses, host drum hoops every night, and host subsistence farms for survival.

Fox’s prose is compassionately connected, exploring lives measured by acceptance, kindness, and connection. Even as we insightfully move forward in the more alienating aspects of office culture—network parties, break room concerns—Fox is most invested in what makes us more people than employees: We watch closely for the moment when a new life is pregnant with change. Reach out to the person next to us. This far-reaching collection even goes to a future lunar colony in “The Human,” where two of their former coworkers stick together, feeling content even though they’re literally burned to the ground. In one of the most poignant stories, “Center of the Circle,” the hippie shaves all her hair in a transformational move and her childhood sweetheart smears her body, trying to persuade her to stay in the commune, in between leaving their soft lives and offerings bare.

LIMITS OF HOUSING
stories
by Blake Sanz
204 p. University of Iowa. Paper, $16.

This engaging first collection learns to right the wrongs and forgive the wrongdoers. Part I, “Lives of the Saints” follows different characters – an addict trying to regain the straight path her father wanted for her, a burlesque teacher teaching at a church – while the more powerful stories of the book Part II, “Manuel and Tommy”, a family falling apart. It follows and then reassembles itself. His grown son Tomás, a literature-loving college basketball player and later a journalist, still resents his father, Manuel, who was once a young political artist in Mexico and later a failed screenprinter in Louisiana. leaving him as a child. Manuel’s teenage daughter Emi from another collapsed marriage tries to start a new family for herself with her best friend Frida.



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