The Age of Perpetual Light

July 3, 2017
Weil (The Great Glass Sea) showcases his narrative abilities in these offbeat and spirited stories. The opening, “No Flies, No Folly,” follows the hardscrabble life of a Russian Jewish peddler named Yankel Yushrov, now living in the United States, sometime in the middle of the 20th century. While showing an Edison lamp to an Amish woman, he falls breathtakingly in love. Yankel appears again in the final story, “Hello from Here,” writing a letter home early in his emigration. In “Angle of Reflection,” a group of adventurous teenagers looking for the wreckage of a Soviet satellite suffer a life-altering tragedy. “The First Bad Thing” has a hard-bitten noir flavor, starting with an unnamed man in a truck on a dark night who picks up an unnamed woman obviously on the run from something. Other stories include a showdown between a group of frustrated farmers and a power company encroaching on their bucolic lives, and a couple’s unsteady (mal)adjustment to a new life in cramped quarters in New York. Weil’s stories have the scope and detours of longer work, and often seem to move on their own, following the protagonists’ unpredictable lives. The breadth of subject matter and styles is impressive, defying easy categorization and making the stories all the more memorable. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

Starred review from July 1, 2017

These stories approach light and its effect on people from many angles, both oblique and direct, with the entire collection bookended by two stories that are part of the same narrative. The first, "No Flies, No Folly," set in late 19th-century Pennsylvania, concerns itinerant tinker Yankel and his illicit relationship with Amish farm wife Esther, to whom he brings the forbidden technology of electricity. The final story, "Hello from Here," portrays a younger Yankel, a deserter from the tsar's army, living in a Baltic photography studio writing his farewells to his family before escaping to America. "Essential Constituent of Modern Living Standards" explores the violent history of rural electrification, while "Angle of Reflection" takes on the emergence of space mirrors to counter the brutal effects of the Bosnian war. Penultimately, "The First Bad Thing" transports the reader into a stark American future of perpetual light, where the pervasive use of space mirrors to boost production has killed true night. This collection blends the evolving technology of light with its multifaceted impact on people's lives. The characters and settings are crafted with an ethereal skill that sets the mind spinning into new orbits. VERDICT Highly recommended for the discerning reader.--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2017

These stories approach light and its effect on people from many angles, both oblique and direct, with the entire collection bookended by two stories that are part of the same narrative. The first, "No Flies, No Folly," set in late 19th-century Pennsylvania, concerns itinerant tinker Yankel and his illicit relationship with Amish farm wife Esther, to whom he brings the forbidden technology of electricity. The final story, "Hello from Here," portrays a younger Yankel, a deserter from the tsar's army, living in a Baltic photography studio writing his farewells to his family before escaping to America. "Essential Constituent of Modern Living Standards" explores the violent history of rural electrification, while "Angle of Reflection" takes on the emergence of space mirrors to counter the brutal effects of the Bosnian war. Penultimately, "The First Bad Thing" transports the reader into a stark American future of perpetual light, where the pervasive use of space mirrors to boost production has killed true night. This collection blends the evolving technology of light with its multifaceted impact on people's lives. The characters and settings are crafted with an ethereal skill that sets the mind spinning into new orbits. VERDICT Highly recommended for the discerning reader.--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 15, 2017
A rich, often dazzling collection of short stories linked by themes while ranging widely in style from Babel-like fables to gritty noir and sci-fi.Weil (The Great Glass Sea, 2014, etc.) says he wrote these eight stories over the course of a decade, yet they show a sustained preoccupation with light: as image, object of desire, and source of wonder, among other things. In the opening tale, "No Flies, No Folly," a Jewish peddler in 1901 Pennsylvania Dutch country woos a farming woman with an Edison bulb in a scene of splendidly odd seduction. The peddler will return in the final tale, in which his younger self, a deserter from the Russian army, encounters a photographer who "spoke of bromides, emulsion," but was talking "always, about only one thing: light." Weil's other theme is scientific progress, and the two motifs often intersect. "Long Bright Line" follows a girl's fascination with flight and airplanes. The coming of electricity is featured in a brooding tale in which a remote town has waited decades for the miracle and then, in 1940, battles the power company that has bypassed it as being unprofitable. "Angle of Reflection" tells of youths in the early 1990s pondering life's dangers, mean parents, and the Soviets' "space mirror," a science-fiction-ish technology that aimed to boost productivity by lengthening the hours of daylight. While the gadget failed in real life, Weil imagines it into a not-distant future and the problems of life without real darkness, as he did extensively in The Great Glass Sea. One of three stories that refer to these mirrors is the appropriately noir "The First Bad Thing." A woman of 20 and an older man find a physical connection, "like mountain cats tied tail to tail," and then flee murky pasts, traveling north to Canada in the "long dusk" the mirrors have left in search of true night. Weil's stories are engrossing, persuasively detailed, and written with a deep affection for the way language can, in masterful hands, convey us to marvelous new worlds.

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Starred review from August 1, 2017
Author of the widely acclaimed debut novel The Great Glass Sea (2014), Weil delivers a collection of eight stellar short stories, several bordering on novella length. As with his first book of short fiction, New Valley (2009), Weil returns to themes of isolation and desire, this time threading a thematic brightness throughout, taking on electrification, modernity, and illumination in myriad forms. The opening story, No Flies, No Folly, follows a Jewish peddler in turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania who introduces an Amish housewife to an Edison lamp and departs with more than he bargained for. In The Essential Constituent of Modern Living Standards, a rural community finds itself cut off from the power grid, until a socialist provocateur arrives. Beautiful Ground captures a Brooklyn couple working through the doldrums of marriage by attending a swingers party, which is set against media coverage of a midwinter expedition to the North Pole, conducted entirely in darkness. Whether it takes place in the nineteenth-century countryside or a not-too-distant future, each one of Weil's magical, memorable stories carries this charge in all our hearts, this flash that fires in us even now, this spark that drives us ever forward. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)