The distinctive, not to say brain-aching, novelty of Cain’s Jawbone is that its 100 pages are numbered out of sequence. And it’s the reader’s job to discover what the real order is and thereby identify six murder victims and their killers. The number of possible combinations of pages is a figure that is 158 numbers long.
Scannell decided to try to find the right sequence by fulfilling a “lifelong dream”, as she put it, to turn her “entire bedroom wall into a murder board”. She cut all the pages out of her paperback copy and pasted them on her wall, rearranging them as she attempts to make progress in what is billed as “the world’s most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle”.
The card came out of an old SeaWorld tourist pack, the kind with glossy pictures of animals doing tricks, purchased for excited kids by worn-down parents then tossed in a drawer when vacation is over. Its front showed two orcas, one big, one juvenile, jumping gracefully from the confines of their chlorine-blue pool as sunburnt 1980s patrons in tank tops snapped photos and gawked.
The back carried a plea for help.
A couple decades ago France suffered a severe shock. A Spanish restaurant called El Bulli, on the Catalan coast north of Barcelona, led a culinary revolution so bold that French cuisine suddenly looked stilted, a self-satisfied tradition stuck in a cloying bed of butter and cream.
In an article the French have never forgotten, Arthur Lubow wrote in The New York Times Magazine that “Spain has become the new France.” Chefs opined that classic French cuisine had run out of gas. It was a country, one esteemed Spanish restaurant critic suggested, where chefs go “to learn what not to do.” How could a veal blanquette or an entrecôte with morels and cream hold a candle to white bean foam with sea urchins or spherical melon caviar?
Short stories carry a lot of baggage. The best of them are often deemed “novelesque,” a nod to their more substantial kin whose shadow always looms. And yet, a great short story is a marvel, achieving its goals in a fraction of the time and space of its loftier cousin. Two different skill sets, one might think, and utterly separate. If you read Portland writer Lily King’s debut story collection, however, you might think otherwise. The award-winning author of “Euphoria” and four other novels, speaks volumes in short form. Her new collection, “Five Tuesdays in Winter,” is as compelling and accomplished as anything you’re likely to read in the genre.
Victoria Chang is interested in the space between things. Lacunae. The unsaid. The unspeakable. Secrets, omissions, and the unknown. She applies a poet’s sensibility and an artistic eye to the details of her personal history in her memoir, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. The book is an excavation of her family’s story, as well as an exploration of Chang’s relationship with her parents and her past. Chang’s mother, now gone, closely guarded details about her life before she moved to America. What little Chang knew of her mom’s story was drawn out reluctantly in one spare interview before her mother’s death. It was only when Chang found a box of family photographs and documents after her mother died that she began to wonder about the specific details of her parents’ lives and what motivated their decisions. Much of their history was lost to time after her mother’s death, and her father’s Alzheimer’s illness rendered his memories inaccessible.