Now here’s a new spin on “eating local” for you.
Supposing you were to pack a picnic for the Hollywood Bowl with exclusively created-in-L.A. foods.
What would be on your menu?
Reverse Engineering is a collection of seven short stories paired with interviews on how they were written — a niftily simple premise. Readers who might be worried about the cost to their enjoyment of seeing how the sausage was made needn’t be, as Tom Conaghan, the book’s editor, explains in his introduction: “Understanding writers’ craft is less like a nautical map than learning to read the stars — it’s not important knowing the route if the purpose of the voyage is to get lost.” He also makes the slightly less demonstrable claim, in the grand lineage of anthology provocation, that “[s]hort story readers are emotionally eloquent enough not to need consolation from life in all its heart-aching richness.” Like the canny horoscope writer, Conaghan can assume that we’ll enjoy being flattered too much to question the claim’s veracity. The stories collected here are unified only by what the editor calls their “vivacious diversity,” and the stories and interviews certainly display a broad range of approaches to the art; however, there seems to be something of a divide between feeling and argument as the anthology’s organizing, or at least driving, principles.
The very first line of her exceedingly moody story warns us to expect the unexpected: “The deep sea is a haunted house,” Armfield writes, “a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.”
And yet even that gothic portent can’t prepare us for what lies beneath the surface of this queer romance.
The title sounds like a metaphor, but there really is a theatre made of a whale’s ribcage in this sweeping historical epic. It stands on a grassy headland on the Dorset coast, draped in scenery, the creation of young Cristabel Seagrave, whose passion for amateur dramatics ropes in family and servants alike at the Chilcombe estate. Here we have the country set in all their jazz-age glory, with cocktails at breakfast, costumes at teatime and a general sense that the world is a peach ripe for plucking.
When Chrysta Bilton’s mother found “The One,” she knew. He was a stranger off the street and not someone she would marry, but he was the man she would persuade to share his semen so she could “go home, pull out a turkey baster, and impregnate herself.”
That our existence begins with a clash of cells doesn’t mean that there isn’t something divine about it, Bilton believes. As one of 36 children conceived with sperm from the same donor, Bilton considers genetic inheritance and destiny from an unusual point of view in her memoir, “Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings.”