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Seaside Stories
Tayyaba, who moved here from Pakistan with her older brother and sister, precociously explains that she feels “most at peace” near the water.
V. Bensonhurst Girls
No matter what her ethnic background, a girl growing up in Bensonhurst coats the outer layer of her personality with strength, sass, and neighborhood pride. The girls of Bensonhurst exude genuine intensity in almost everything they do. If the time and place calls for dressing up, their hair and makeup will be meticulously arranged; when there is nothing particular to do, they master how to look spontaneously mussed up. Even ambivalence is emphasized with an exaggerated shrug. Such behaviors may sound contrived, but on the streets of Bensonhurst they are perfectly natural.
As these Bishop Kearney girls head into their limo for the prom, cooing relatives and neighbors snap hundreds of photos, stopping traffic.
Outside Diva Dance Studio—motto: “we’re so glam we sweat glitter”—these three dressed up as little “dolls” for their picture day.
Irina and Robin hold their own during a very serious water fight—girls against boys—the first one of the summer.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Edwidge Danticat’s Everything Inside: Stories
By Yvonne C. GarrettSEPT 2019 | Books
Danticat’s writing is language stripped bare which lets her stories and characters breathe. There is a rising intensity in these stories from the first sentence of the first page that draws the reader in and demands we pay attention.
Lily Tuck’s Heathcliff Redux: A Novella and Stories
By Joseph PeschelJUNE 2020 | Books
The collection’s best story is “Carl Schurz Park,” which concerns a murder and one of the murderers. In other stories, a woman finds a dead swan; people pictured in a 1950s photograph inspire a character study; and a fellow called Yann Johansen harasses a woman, once a Rajneeshee cultist, with odd and accusatory emails.
Aimee Parkison and Carol Guess’s Girl Zoo
By Melanie OdelleFEB 2019 | Books
If the girl is in print, then where is her body? Girl Zoo, a collaboration between Aimee Parkison and Carol Guess, published by Fiction Collective 2, takes us into the narrative negative, into the underworld of the missing, where the bodies of captured girls are perpetually contained and observable.
Girl, Woman, Other
By John DominiMAR 2020 | Books
That familiarity is what I’d emphasize. Myself, I love what’s outré and of-the-moment about Girl, Woman, Other. I was at once won over by its fast and loose way with the English sentence, quasi-colloquial, with minimal punctuation and capitalization, sometimes breaking down into short stacks of single lines. Yet it doesn’t take an aesthete to find the prose accessible. Anyone can appreciate Evaristo’s sensitivity to the passions in her people.
