Grand Union

Starred review from August 1, 2019
Nineteen erudite stories wheel through a constellation of topics, tones, and fonts to dizzying literary effect. After launching a quiver of short fiction in the New Yorker, Granta, and the Paris Review, Smith adds 11 new pieces to publish her first collection. A reader can enter anywhere, as with Smith's bravura "The Lazy River," which "unlike the river of Heraclitus, is always the same no matter where you happen to step into it." The artificial aquatic amusement, rotating endlessly through a Spanish resort, is "a non-judgement zone" for tourists where "we're submerged, all of us." Wit marbles Smith's fiction, especially the jaunty "Escape From New York," which riffs on the urban legend that Michael Jackson--"people had always overjudged and misunderestimated him"--ferried Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in a rental car out of the smoking debris of 9/11. Even in "Two Men Arrive in a Village," a global parable of horror and repetition, absurdity bubbles up: "After eating, and drinking--if it is a village in which alcohol is permitted--the two men will take a walk around...and, as they reach out for your watch or cigarettes or wallet or phone or daughter, the short one, in particular, will say solemn things like 'Thank you for your gift.' " In the wondrous "Words and Music," the survivor of a pair of disputatious sisters meditates on peak musical experiences. "Kelso Deconstructed" takes up the bleak, racist real-life stabbing of Kelso Cochrane in London in 1959, and "Meet the President!" is set in an even bleaker future where a wailing child interrupts a young teenager's elaborate virtual video game, her misery "an acute high pitched sound, such as a small animal makes when, out of sheer boredom, you break its leg." Much less successful are "Downtown" and "Parents' Morning Epiphany," which read like fragments trying to become essays. Still, Smith begins and ends with two arresting mother-daughter tales--the first nestled in alienation, the last, "Grand Union," in communion with the dead. Several of Smith's stories are on their ways to becoming classics.

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Starred review from August 12, 2019
In Smith’s smart and bewitching story collection, the novelist’s first (after the essay collection Feel Free), the modern world is refracted in ways that are both playful and rigorous, formally experimental and socially aware. A drag queen struggles with aging in “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets” as she misses the “fabled city of the past” now that “every soul on these streets was a stranger.” A child’s school worksheet spurs a humorous reassessment of storytelling itself in the postmodern “Parents’ Morning Epiphany.” “Two Men Arrive in a Village,” in which a violent duo invades a settlement, aspires to “perfection of parable.” Some stories, including “Just Right,” about a family in prewar Greenwich Village, and the sci-fi “Meet the President!,” in which a privileged boy meets a lower-class English girl, read more like exercises. But more surprising and rewarding are stories constructed of urban impressions and personal conversations, like “For the King,” in which the narrator meets an old friend for dinner in Paris. And the standout “The Canker” uses speculative tropes to reflect on the current political situation: people live harmoniously in storyteller Esorik’s island society, until the new mainland leader, the Usurper, inspires “rage” and the “breaking of all the cycles had ever known.” Smith exercises her range without losing her wry, slightly cynical humor. Readers of all tastes will find something memorable in this collection. Agent: Georgia Garrett, Rogers, Coleridge and White.

Starred review from September 15, 2019
In cunning and mordant short stories, collected here for the first time, Smith, an empathic and sardonic global writer, inhabits the psyches of radically different characters in varied settings as she orchestrates stealthily cutting dramas of generational and societal power struggles complicated by gender and race. Brexit-era Brits float in an artificial circular waterway at a Spanish resort in The Lazy River, fully aware that they are drifting in a metaphor. In the sexually scorching Sentimental Education, a mother lounging in a London park reflects on her aggressive relationship with a college boyfriend when they were two of four black students at their school. Adept at sudden psychological pivots, Smith portrays sparring mothers and daughters, a disgraced cop, and a hilarious yet traumatized transgender woman of color, and brings together two eight-year-olds: Donovan, a white boy whose parents run a raggedy Greenwich Village puppet theater in the late 1950s, and Cassie, a Black chess prodigy. Other stories trace the Caribbean diaspora, critique the corrosive theater of social media, and envision the privileged dwelling in virtual realities on a ravaged Earth. Fury, heartbreak, and drollery collide in masterfully crafted prose that ranges in effect from the exquisitely tragic lyricism of Katherine Mansfield to the precisely calibrated acid bath of Jamaica Kincaid as Smith demonstrates her unique prowess for elegant disquiet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2019

The author of award-winning novels ranging from White Teeth to Swing Time and a celebrated critic to boot (her Feel Free: Essays recently won the National Book Critics Circle's criticism award), Smith offers her first collection of short stories. Here, ten penny-bright new pieces add to the allure of those you already know from The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and more.

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