Literary Reviews, Page 136
Gravity Fiction, Scott Geisel, Editor
Well, here's a little something different from me in regard to literary reviews. The subject of today’s review is a short story anthology entitled Gravity Fiction [BookSurge Publishing, 2009], edited by Scott Geisel. After having reviewed Mr. Geisel’s superb short story “Marathon,” he was kind enough to send me a copy of Gravity Fiction which includes short stories written by authors who had been college students at the time of the pieces’ compositions.
Mr. Geisel is a writing teacher at Wright State University and formerly an editor of MudRock: Stories & Tales, as well as for other publications. He was also a finalist for the 2008 Eric Hoffer Award for fiction. The idea for Gravity Fiction was to publish a print anthology showcasing the works of emerging collegiate writers.
In regard to this first edition of a projected series, many of the stories selected were written by students attending Mr. Geisel’s university and several had previously been featured in MudRock. For future editions, Mr. Geisel hopes to restrict selections to writers still in undergraduate programs and to present stories from a wider selection of colleges and universities. The stories are all literary, though one invokes a science fiction veneer.
So here goes:
“Beautiful Things,” by Courtney Mauk, is a tale of an unmarried mother (Lydia) and her emotionally detached daughter (Izzie) attending kindergarten. The story is effectively told in the present tense, third person, with alternating passages from the mother’s and daughter’s respective perspectives. Izzie exhibits mild obsessive-compulsive symptoms and also appears to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. She has difficulty paying attention during class and is sent home one day with a note by the school’s counselor who notes her “anti-social behavior."
Lydia wrestles with financial pressures due to the unreliability of her daughter’s father keeping up with his child support payments, as well as with sexual harassment at work. Her reaction to the note her daughter bears indicates a building level of frustration, and perhaps guilt, within Lydia as she struggles to come to terms with her daughter’s afflictions, presumably engendered by circumstances the child encounters within her broken household. Izzie is fixated every evening on a train passing by on its way to Chicago and secretly yearns to be on it, presumably as a medium of escape. Click to continue:
