{"id":116926,"date":"2017-10-20T13:31:18","date_gmt":"2017-10-20T17:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116926"},"modified":"2017-11-07T11:05:50","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T16:05:50","slug":"staff-picks-foxes-unicorns-and-ghostworms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/20\/staff-picks-foxes-unicorns-and-ghostworms\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Foxes, Unicorns, and Ghostworms"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Yrsa Daley-Ward\u2019s new collection, bone<\/em><\/a>, opens with a small explosion, a two-line poem called \u201cIntro\u201d: \u201cI am the tall dark stranger \/ those warnings prepared you for.\u201d The poems that follow pick up the dual meaning here\u2014of threat and of erotic desire. Often, the two are intertwined, as when she writes of an affair, \u201cRemember on the right night and \/ under the right light \/ any idea can seem like a good one.\u201d Daley-Ward, who was raised by her religious grandparents in a small town in Northern England, self-published bone<\/em> in 2014; it\u00a0sold more than twenty thousand copies, a staggering figure for a self-published book, let alone of poetry. Penguin reissued an expanded edition, with forty additional pages, last month. The excellent long autobiographical \u201cIt Is What It Is\u201d describes her brother\u2019s heated reaction to their father\u2019s funeral, and the breathlessness as she narrates their swift escape along the highway, thinking of their separation as children, propels the poem to its painful close. \u201cToday is the first day of the rest of it,\u201d she writes in the last poem, resigned but also dogged, \u201cOf course there will be other first \/ days \/ but none exactly like this.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

Assigned reading can be either tedious or life changing. Pastoralia<\/a><\/em>, the second story collection from the 2017 Man Booker Prize winner, George Saunders, falls into the latter category for me. A little more than four years ago, I was a junior in college, a shy journalism student who didn\u2019t especially identify with any of the newshounds surrounding me. I enrolled in a fiction workshop, and when that went well, I enrolled in another. The critiques, the meat of the class, were valuable, but what I long for now are those undergrad creative-writing syllabi, packed as they were with revelations: the full-moon beauty and madness of Kelly Link; the plinky, playful fables of Italo Calvino; the lyrical precision and tightly knotted emotions of Alice Munro. Those first encounters with the writers on those lists shaped the way I think about fiction. The author who struck me most, though, was Saunders, in whose work I found everything I\u2019d ever wanted from writing but never known how to express. His\u00a0stories full of arresting images and incredible heart, tales that were bitingly funny and dark without descending into cynicism. I fell under the spell of short fiction and began writing my own. And now I\u2019m here\u2014probably as the result of a number of factors, but I can\u2019t discount the impact of stumbling across Saunders at the right time. I hope he wins every prize there is. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

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