"Days of Awe" by A.M. Homes (Granta, 2018)

Stories from New Yorker, Guardian, One Story, Playboy, etc.

• Brother on Sunday - The 3rd-person PoV protagonist Tom is a 53 y.o. doctor spending a few days at the beach with his wife and their set of friends. He doesn't particularly like them. They ask his advice about their spots, etc. They have affairs. His brother arrives. Rivalry turns into a brawl.
• Whose Story Is It, and Why Is It Always on Her Mind? - 4.5 pages. 3 therapist sessions. In the first, we hear how the patient self-harmed herself with rose thorns. In the second we learn that her grandmother was raped in rose bushes when young, that she didn't want her daughter. In the third, the learn that the patient's mother obsessively stole roses. The therapist offers her a sweet shaped like a rose.
• Days of Awe - 50+ pages. A lesbian (bi?) novelist and a male war correspondent who've known each other off and on for years find themselves at the same Genocide conference, booked into the same hotel. They have sex because she wants to be reminded what it's like. They argue about whether fact or fiction stirs the most empathy. He says she "grieves for others because she can't feel anything in her own life". She writes about the holocaust and is attacked for inauthenticity. She meets Otto, "keeper of the grief", her hero. She argues with her girlfriend on the phone. When she returns they make up rather than break up.
• Hello Everybody - Mostly dialogue. Walter, returning from a term of studies, meetsup with Cheryl, a close friend with fake breasts. Her brother died 3 years before from a snake bite that grandparents ignored. She went to see her mother's therapist. She tells her sister that Walter's adopted. She twice asks to sleep with him. He refuses. He goes out for a meal with the family.
• All is Good Except for the Rain - two women meet for a meal. A husband ditches his wife, then returns. No.
• The National Cage Bird Show - Different fonts for different people in a chat-room for parakeet lovers. But they don't all like birds. One's a bomb-disposal soldier on active duty. Feels very long at 44 pages.
• Your Mother Was a Fish - 7 pages. The great-grandmother swam to the States in a mermaid costume. It stuck. She married Ray, whose mother was a bearded lady and whose father was the world's tallest man. Their daughter Penelope had a longer sharp index finger. Their son had wings. Penelope gave birth to hermaphrodite twins, had an affair with a dolphin, built a spaceship and went to Mars.
• The Last Good Time - A father who's unhappy (too quiet for his wife) feeds his baby then drives to his dying grandmother who gives him cash. He sees photos of himself as a child dressed as a cowboy - he even went to school in the outfit, with a gun. He flies (from Europe?) to LA, drives to Disneyland where he was last happy. He recalls a holiday there with his parents. While he goes on the rides he recalls how his father suddenly left, how he and his father met on Sundays. "he laughs at himself for still being in love with the idea of cowboys - wondering what it is he thinks is so magical about men learning to be tough, to hold on to their feelings." "He goes on each of the rides multiple times. He tries to stay focussed. The disorientation of going up and down, high and low, and round and round allows him to reprocess his experiences". A young female worker (a "cast member") takes him to her flat of left-over merchandize and food. They have sex. "how do you know what's real?" he asks. "You bite into it," she says. They drive to Joshua Tree. It snows. He goes back to Disneyland. There's fake snow. He phones home, saying that he's got what he needs and he'll be returning soon.
  Not a subtle story, though it's pacy, with humour and surprise.
• Be Mine - 6 pages. An artist and therapist live together. The artist wants a baby or at least a pet. The therapist suggests she get a plant and stop complaining. Nearly all dialog. 20% shorter and it would be ok.
• A Prize for Every Player - A money-conscious family go shopping. They find and keep a baby, the husband makes a political speech, and they save money.
• Omega Point - A grandmother tells her family she's part-Chinese. Her Chinese side helped build a nuclear bomb and develop a citrous fruit. A Chinese man appears after decades away. Bones of Peking Man have been sent to the family over the years.
• She Got Away - Prelude to "Hello Everybody"? Abegail (married to Burton because he doesn't intrude on her loneliness) phones her sister Cheryl asking her to return because their parents are on ventilators in a hospital. Their brother died of an undiagnosed snake bite 6 months before and the pool gate's code is 1234. They get the parents back. Abegail dies in the night. The electricity fails.

Other reviews

• Tessa Hadley (in this new collection of stories I’m having a problem. It feels as if it’s to do with liking the characters, but perhaps it’s just that the rhythm of the writing has lost its elasticity somewhere. ... The first story, “Brother on Sunday”, is the best in the collection ... We don’t need to like the characters in a story, but we need to like the writer’s relation to her characters, to feel she’s caught them in their act with wit and poise. Sometimes the writing here just isn’t funny enough to help us enjoy them.)
• Lara Feigel (Much of Homes’s skill lies in inventing plots that seem just about plausible as she leads you along but far less plausible when you stop to consider them. She narrates the stories in a pacy present tense, energised by amusing quips and details.)
• Ramona Ausubel (Whatever the tone, hanging over “Days of Awe” are questions about how we metabolize strangeness, danger, horror. Impossible things happen all the time. In each story the characters seem to be looking around at their lives and asking: Is this even real? Has the world always been so jagged? )
• Belinda McKeon (Several of these 12 stories seem unfinished but some are compelling with unexpected nuggets ... The collection is distinguished by the title story, an account of the affair of a novelist and a war correspondent at a symposium on genocide, but what elevates that story above the others is its attention to the nuances and layers of a story of human behaviour which is complex because it is also often funny and oddball, rather than having that complexity short-changed by those qualities. Which is to say that too often, these stories gesture and caper with no apparent ability to land, not just in terms of anything like plot but also stylistically ... two pieces in the collection (All is Good Except For the Rain and Be Mine) read like the scripts for listless two-hander plays. Meanwhile, both the formal approach and the character tropes of The National Cage Bird Show, which depicts the different voices on an internet forum for bird-lovers using different fonts, and tells the stories of a sad young Manhattanite and a traumatised young veteran, seem dated and unexciting.)
• Johanna Thomas-Corr (The two opening stories, oddly, are the most lacklustre. ... The 50-page title story, about a fling between a war correspondent and a novelist at a conference on genocide, displays some of the dark wit we’ve come to appreciate from Homes: Holocaust jokes and penis chocolates, but the writing is flat and affectless. ... Too many of the other stories collapse into the same themes and archetypes. Hapless men wait for their lives to begin, women suffer psychosexual crises and middle-aged fools get sucked in by the promises of plastic surgeons, nutritionists and shrinks.)