The Island Dwellers

March 1, 2018
Playwright Silverman's debut story collection deals with a coterie of international nomads, lost girls, and millennial wastrels as they navigate the mean streets of New York and the clean streets of Tokyo, among other places.Camilo is a feckless performance artist who is liberated from sexual monogamy. Ancash is the sleek, ethereal diplomat's son who engineers violence into his sexual encounters. Yuliya, a refugee from the turmoil of Cape Verde, navigates Tokyo as if by not touching she can spare herself from being touched. Sarah, a professor in Iowa, resolves to be a "bad person" only with her impossibly lovelorn teaching assistant, Topher, but finds she cannot contain badness to the bedroom alone. In a book filled with memorable characters, Silverman's sharp sense of place, her eye for telling detail, and her pitch-perfect dialogue tumble these stories through their interlocking narratives with great brio. Told from alternating locales (New York, Tokyo, Iowa, Yokohama), these first-person narratives of drift and wrack detail the generational angst of young, urban, queer, or allied loners as they seek to navigate a world whose rules are in flux and where all identity seems to lead to anonymity. Characters reappear throughout the collection. This has the effect of creating community out of what might otherwise feel like an excess of alienation but unfortunately also results in highlighting the thematic similarities between the stories. The characters, while all compelling in their own rights, are all disaffected in similar ways--the men needy; the women resistant to being needed. This thematic overlap has the unfortunate effect of weakening the impact of the individual stories. Even when they are motivated by unique premises, the characters' responses, both to each other and to the world through which they drift, do not startle the reader so much as confirm what the reader has already been led to believe. A shimmering collection that speaks with humor and, ultimately, tenderness about people whose lives rarely allow for either.

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April 2, 2018
Playwright Silverman debuts with an audacious collection of 11 arresting interconnected short stories. These narratives can stand alone but take on deeper significance together, depicting people living on literal and metaphorical islands of isolation, despite their entanglements with each other. In “Girl Canadian Shipwreck,” New Yorker Macey tells a story of being shipwrecked on an island where she finds a set of islanders and a young woman who begs Macey and her fellow travelers to take her away with them once their ship is fixed. They leave her, and Macey callously says that one shouldn’t go to an island if one doesn’t want to be on an island, an eerie proclamation that could be made about any of the lonely cast populating these pages. In “Maria of the Grapes,” Maria pines for her friend Ancash in Tokyo, who prefers men; in “Mamushi,” Ancash tells the story of an abusive relationship he shared at 17 with an older man. Risa thinks Japan is the safest place in the world, but her involvement with a powerful man leads to her disappearance (“The Safest Place in the World”). Silverman creates a harsh, seductive world that is both more and less than it seems, showing how deeply people will deceive themselves to believe they’ve found connection. Silverman’s winning stories are varied and always engrossing.

May 1, 2018
Silverman's assured debut collection showcases flawed characters at personal crossroads, grappling with unrequited love, deteriorating relationships, and the search for autonomy. Largely alternating between the United States and Japan, characters are at times disoriented and vulnerable, and their struggles are deeply felt. Pretoria tracks a South African expat as she vacillates between the burgeoning relationship with her earnest Japanese boyfriend and the pull of her homeland. A professor's seduction of her young teaching assistant devolves into an unsettling exploration of internal justification as she wields a newfound power in uneasy, manipulative ways. In Maria of the Grapes, the heady titular character navigates unrequited love and a strong emotional connection with the magnetic Ancash. Maureen follows a recent college grad who jumps at the chance to assist the owner of a production company, the aforementioned Maureen, in writing a script. While Maureen's behavior first seems eccentric, her late-night summonses begin to uncover internal questions and doubts. Surveillance portrays two friends and their spiral of complementary paranoia. Vivid and passionate, Silverman's 11 tales offer affecting and bracing journeys.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)