A01=Susan Steinberg
Author_Susan Steinberg
avant-garde literature
Category=FYB
creative fiction
creative writing
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
Experimental fiction
experimental storytelling
experimental writing
FC2
fiction
fiction collective 2
novel
Product details
- ISBN 9781573661294
- Weight: 276g
- Dimensions: 141 x 222mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2006
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Propelled by monomania, these are stories that glide from the preoccupations of one speaker to those of another. The weight of these obsessions, driven by the kinetic and emotive force of Susan Steinberg's capable hand, is what fuels her fiction. ""Hydroplane"" reads like a nocturnal drive along a beclouded and vapory highway, working in a similar direction as the novels of Samuel Beckett, most notably ""Watt"" and ""Molloy"". Much like those title characters, the speakers populating this collection are crippled by their loss, able only to rummage through recollections of the past as protection against an indistinct future. One story, ""Static,"" follows a few steps behind a teenage girl as she spends the summer at the home of her divorcee father. Squandering evenings behind the House of Mirrors, she conceives of herself as a sexual entity, and an object of male desire. Each of Steinberg's stories builds upon itself as if telegraphed, relaying mere slivers of the past. One sentence glissades into the next as though in perpetual motion: ""And I thought of trees. How they grow out of nothing - dirt. How they grow into nothing - air. How somehow there's life - a spark, until it gets crushed. That's life you know. Screaming oneself awake."" That is, to awaken from a dream while behind the wheel and to realize that the past is not only alive and well, but thriving.
Susan Steinberg received her MFA in English from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She is the editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and author of The End of Free Love (FC2, 2003). Her stories have also been published in Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, and The Massachusetts Review. She teaches English at University of San Francisco.
