front cover of The Questionable Ones
The Questionable Ones
Judith Keller
Seagull Books, 2023
A brilliant collection of micro-fiction, reflecting our fragmented times.
 
With quirky humor and wry insight, Swiss author Judith Keller’s micro-fictions unravel the fabric of daily life. She delves into the aporia of language by taking idiomatic expressions literally, unpacking the multiple meanings of words, and confounding expectations. Seven Zurich tram stops provide the framework for these familiar yet absurd portraits of passers-by, fellow passengers on the tram, the unemployed and the overemployed, the innocent and the suspicious, young mothers and confused elderly. The reader is taken on a journey through the city and offered glimpses of people going more or less successfully about their lives. These deceptively banal glimpses, however, show us more than we expect—they turn the lens back on us, puncture our complacency and ask, "Who are you to judge?"

The characters are hapless and far-fetched, trying to find their footing on shifting ground and grateful for what happiness they can find. In just a sentence or two, Keller unlocks metaphysical trapdoors. The Questionable Ones offers a collection of snapshots that reveal the extraordinary lurking inside the ordinary and the ordinary at the core of the extraordinary.
 

 
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front cover of The Quick-Change Artist
The Quick-Change Artist
Stories
Cary Holladay
Ohio University Press, 2006

In these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the rhythms of rock and roll, The Quick-Change Artist is at once whimsical and hard-edged, dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic.

Romance, a sense of place and belonging, and the supernatural—especially in the lives of children coming of age—offer windows into worlds beyond the ordinary throughout The Quick-Change Artist. In the title story, a young chambermaid is in love with a foreign magician who performs at the hotel where she works. In “Heaven,” set during the 1918 flu epidemic, a struggling mother and son rely on the support of their fortune-telling plow horse. The narrator of “Jane’s Hat” recalls a childhood enlivened by an unusual school principal and a friend who starts finding beauty everywhere.

Horses and the people who love them, wanderers and those who feed them, creatures that disappear and those who search for them: these are stories with a constant heart.

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