American Made - Reviews

Whether in the form of allegory, fable, sales pitch or police report, among others, these 19 stories are marked by a feeling of despair and pointlessness. Even the best of the lot, Russell Banks's "The Fish," contains this feeling. Yet this allegory of how man's greed and fear destroys that which he desires is so simply and charmingly written that the obviousness of the symbolism is unimportant. Not so "The Seersucker Suit" by Marianne Hauser (the man in the story is literally a dog), which while attempting to reveal truths about the relationships between men and women, only succeeds in irritating. Similarly, in Ursule Molinaro's "The Apocalyptic Flirtation" the male half of the couple is not an animal, but a machine. The stories in which an experimental writing style is emphasized, such as "March 11" by George Chambers, neither reveal truths nor are formally inventive.

-Publisher's Weekly

The writers of the Fiction Collective are among America's boldest literary innovators. Here, 19 of them fashion a disturbing portrait of who and where we are. These writers show little interest in either conventional narrative or realism. Minimalists, they use half-links to suggest ruptures in human relationships and syncopate their linguistic rhythms to accent the hilarity and horror of life. Apocalypse is omnipresent, whether imaged as a martyred fish, a talking dog, a sex swinger, or the evil double of Howdy Doody. Throughout, we are shown mistaking appearance for reality, yielding to greed, folly, and moral confusion. Many of these stories are fresh, others more eccentric than original. But they all deserve a reading.

-Arthur Waldhorn, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY