Lynn Sloan

Short story collections are notoriously hard to sum up succinctly. Unless they are interconnected stories, they might be linked by theme or even just by the fact of their author. And often some stories are far stronger than others. Luckily, in Lynn Sloan’s emotionally resonant collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough, the stories are linked thematically and all of them are strong and complete pieces.

Each of these unique stories has complicated characters who embody endurance and resilience. They are stories of comebacks, of turning points, of surprises, many layered, masterful, and full of depth and feeling. The writing is crisp and precise. And the reader is given the gift of unexpected, but entirely earned, endings. There’s a cook who operates an illegal restaurant out of his house after his business partner was caught dealing drugs. There’s a woman whose ex shows up when their son gets arrested and just as she’s dealing with a bear at her remote home. There’s an aging actor faced with his partner, once a well known actress herself, sinking into the grip of Alzheimer’s and the demands her care puts on him and his career. There’s a photography professor asked to recommend for tenure a man she knows to be a sexual predator. There’s a woman who agrees to meet a former lover long after he left her. In each of these and the other stories, there is a sense of loss, of grief, of betrayal, but also a push back against the clearly defined and expected way forward. Sloan’s characters are haunted by the past and their decisions and placed in the seminal situations of their stories, they make interesting and real choices about moving forward. For those looking for an introduction to the short story form, these stories are polished gems. The opposite of uplifting, they are powerful and affecting and will certainly appeal to a literarily-minded audience.… (lisätietoja)

One of the fiction-writing super powers I admire most is the ability to inhabit a wide range of characters and worlds, and to write about each of them with great empathy and understanding.

In her soon-to-be released story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough, Lynn Sloan shows a special gift in this regard. She immerses us in the lives of everyone from a deceived and disillusioned widow, to an anxious soldier pulled into a possibly criminal scheme, to a worried mother of an aspiring prizefighter. As Sloan explores the inner and outer and conflicts that these characters face, she does so with deep feeling and insight.… (lisätietoja)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Getting the details right of a character-heavy domestic drama is a lot harder than it might seem at first; although by definition this genre is marked by storylines "that could happen to anybody," the author still has to make those particular people going through it this time unique and compelling on their own, bring something new to the subject of divorce or addiction or at-risk teens that makes us glad that we took the time to read that particular book. And unfortunately Lynn Sloan's Principles of Navigation is not up to the task, a novel that's certainly not badly done in terms of the actual mechanics of putting a story together, but that really obsessively follows several of the standard tropes of the domestic drama exactly (they're trying to get pregnant, he's having an affair, everyone is quietly miserable, etc etc) without bringing any new insights or even compelling reasons to follow along with this particular couple going through the problems this particular time. Another good example of a type of book CCLaP is getting sent on an increasing basis -- a novel that is just not-terrible enough to justify its existence on the forgotten back shelves of Amazon, but that doesn't bring even a single new thing to the hundreds of years and millions of titles of the literary industry it's entering -- this gets an A for effort but a D for originality, averaged out to the so-so score it's receiving today.

Out of 10: 7.1… (lisätietoja)