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As children, Tam and her older brother were swimming when she
suffered her first epileptic seizure. He pulled her from the water
and was crowned a hero. Tam was labeled "disabled" and never swam
again. And so began 30 years of vigilance, never allowing her body
to betray her, never allowing her brother or her family or anyone
else to influence her path. Now, in middle age, a lifetime's worth
of control has taken its toll. Exhausted, she heads to Maine where,
while working on a genealogy project, she falls under the spell of
two dead women: an ancestor, Mary Catherine, who died at 33; the
other, the town ghost. Through their cloistered, tragic lives Tam
relives her own life over and over -- until a distant cousin forces
her to see herself in a new light. Tam's quest to transcend
self-imposed limitations is superbly crafted and richly
satisfying.
Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction is the fourth volume in On the Edge: New Women's Fiction, FC2's ongoing effort to discover new and innovative voices in women's fiction. Determined to contradict the myth that "women don't write experimental fiction," Chick-Lit discovers women writers with a fresh and irreverent wit and honesty, but no less powerful in their rendering of human experience. Chick-Lit collects the original fiction of newly discovered writers, but also the award winning work of notable writers like Carole Maso, Jonis Agee, Stacy Levinne and Carolyn Banks. Marked by innovations in form and point-of-view, the writers in this collection are not satisfied with the terrain commonly referred to as "women's writing." Insane asylum sex, board games that control people's lives, a masochistic pedophile humiliated by his victim, an obese woman paying nickels and quarters for attention from teenage girls, a deranged hair stylist and her disloyal dog, a men's impotence therapy group, a surreal landscape constantly producing the body of a woman's mother: this is writing that shouts, yes, there is such a thing as postfeminist fiction.
Told in a broken shorthand voice, Mazza's language is acute,
evoking a place where the patients, the caregivers, and the system
are all disabled. Teri and Cleo are minimum-wage nurse-aides at a
state ward for severely retarded and physically handicapped
children. They are expected to feed, bathe, clothe, and carry out
the required therapies for their patients in a 4-hour shift.
They're working within a system where money for therapy is only
continued if therapy shows improvement--and yet the state-paid
therapists who oversee the ward know the patients will never show
any improvement. To keep the money coming in, it is up to the
minimum-wage caregivers to "see" and chart important improvements,
thus keeping the therapy program alive.
While in many ways reaffirming the mythic dimension of being on the road already romanticized in American pop and folk culture, "Revelation Countdown" also subtly undermines that view. These stories project onto the open road not the nirvana of personal freedom but rather a type of freedom more closely resembling loss of control. Being in constant motion and passing through new environments destabilizes life, casts it out of phase, heightens perception, skews reactions. Every little problem is magnified to overwhelming dimensions; events segue from slow motion to fast forward; background noises intrude, causing perpetual weehour insomnia. Imagination flourishes, often as an enemy: people suddenly discover that they never really understood their travelling companions. The formerly stable line of their lives veers off course. In such an atmosphere, the title "Revelation Countdown", borrowed from a roadside sign in Tennessee, proves prophetic: It may not arrive at 7:30, but revelation will inevitably find the traveller.
The follow-up volume to Mazza and DeShell's hugely popular Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics features new work by Rikki Ducornet, Eurydice, Elizabeth Graver, Ursule Molinaro, and fourteen other witty and deadly serious writers. Chick-Lit 2 discovers new and alternative voices in women's fiction whose stories do not involve trauma that comes from the outside. As Mazza writes in her introduction, "Sexual assaults and harassments and injurious poor body images do exist and have waged a war on women (the American Medical Association says so). But for this book, I was interested in seeing what action(s) women characters can incite on their own, whether bad or good, hopeful or dead-end, progressive or destructive."
From D. H. Lawrence to Philip Roth, acclaimed male writers have
depicted sex from the perspective of female characters. Now, women
writers from Aimee Bender to Jennifer Egan engage in provocative
fictional cross-dressing, exploring sexuality from the male point
of view. With a foreword by Steve Almond, this provocative
collection includes work from twenty-six women in all, including
Bender, Egan, Susan Minot, Elizabeth Benedict, Alicia Erian, and
Diane Williams. Edited by Gina Frangello, Stacy Bierlein, Cris
Mazza and Kat Meads--four women with a great deal of experience as
editors ("Other Voices Magazine," OV Books, anthologies) and
authors.
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