An Inquiry of Place
What would you do if you could see three seconds into the future?
Matthew Pitt’s “These Are Our Demands” (Engine/Ferry Street Books, 2017) provides an answer. In one short story, Paul is a Polish “minute oracle,” and Maddy knows it. As his English tutor, she does her best to teach him the language, but of course there are always going to be certain things lost in translation. He knows she is pregnant, but does her man know she is carrying a baby boy?
If you’re looking to be kept awake all night by a short fiction collection that will consume you like a fever dream, may I recommend Heartbreaker: Stories by Maryse Meijer, out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2016.
The bare bones prose will beckon you to read quickly, but you do so at your own peril. Meijer’s characters and the actions they take are consistently disturbing.