Carolyn Kuebler was a co-founder of the literary magazine Rain Taxi and for the past ten years she has been the editor of the New England Review. Her stories and essays have been published in The Common and Colorado Review, among others, and “Wildflower Season,” published in The Massachusetts Review, won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay.
Kuebler’s debut novel is Liquid, Fragile, Perishable.
At Lit Hub she tagged "five books that, with their small-town settings and multiple points of view, could be placed in the tradition of [Sherwood Anderson's] Winesburg, Ohio—and yet, like my own, are nothing like Anderson’s at all." One title on the list:
Kathryn Davis, The Thin PlaceRead about the other entries on the list.
Though her uncategorizable writing is more often associated with Hans Christian than with Sherwood, Kathryn Davis brings all the elements of small-town fiction to her sixth novel, as she playfully presents the bare facts of the town’s police log, the local gripes and gossip, the sensuality of the weather and the nearby lake, and her characters’ inevitable interconnectedness. It’s a marvelously agilebook, graced with an omniscient voice that just as easily moves in close to a young girl preening for a pageant as it does to a pack of dogs out for a delicious morning romp with the neighbors’ chickens.
The book also takes the long view, to the four glaciers that covered this town in a time before people, how beautiful it must have been, and how beautiful it will be after people. And as the title implies, there’s very little dividing one world from the other: the living from the dead, the human from the nonhuman.
Which is not to say that the present-day scenes of the book—in the Crockett Home for the Aged, in kitchens and the school auditorium—or the origin stories and preoccupations of her characters, are just backdrop for the book’s metaphysical leanings. Every moment is invested with meticulous noticing, fascination, even affection.
The small New England town of Varennes provides just the right setting for the author to track the movements of a mother beaver, the bacillus she harbors, the handsome young trapper sent to kill her, the shy girl whose knees weaken at his hazel-eyed glance, and the holy holy holy incantations they all share at the town’s church service.
--Marshal Zeringue
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