"An Untamed State" by Roxane Gay begins as any fairy tale would, with, "Once upon a time, in a far-off land…" And, the expanse between it, and any fairy tale with which you are familiar, is wider than anything you can imagine. Gay takes the Brothers Grimm to an entirely new level.
In "Mastiff," a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, a couple who are taking a walk come across some other hikers. After the woman has a brief exchange with them, her date asks why she would bother talking to them; after all, she'd never see them again. She responds by saying that that's the best reason for talking to them.
"Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good." There are things that surface that take us by surprise and, at the same time, wash over us like a warm stream of water, transfixing, and transporting us to moments we thought were lost.
Karen Joy Fowler's PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel, "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves," was the recent focus of a lively discussion of the library's monthly fiction book group. The story is familiar: a family punctured by the loss of one of its members, resulting in each of their unraveling, but the cast of characters has one notable distinction.
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