Yet if you’re lucky, on a fall hike in the Northwest, you can still encounter salmon that leap over towering fish ladders and rocky waterfalls to fatefully give up their lives for more lives. These marvelous animals have value that has nothing to do with their utility to human enterprise. Their existence in nature is itself that value.
For the people in Claire Boyles’ debut collection of short fiction “Site Fidelity,” place is destiny. I don’t mean that in any grand sense, but more as fate or habit. Set in Colorado and Nevada, these stories find traction among the forgotten towns and overlooked lives of the rural West; they are populated by those who stayed behind, or those who came back after trouble found them in the world.
Plot does not anchor or propel New Yorker editor Clare Sestanovich's debut short story collection, Objects of Desire. It isn't of much interest here. Women take odd jobs, live with polyamorous couples, and attempt to build homes. Marriages end. Children graduate college, develop eating disorders, and make art. The stories contain plot insomuch as real life contains plot: we make sense and meaning out of what we're given.
Twenty years ago, I got a glimpse of how it feels to lack one of our vaunted five senses when I took a bonk on the head and lost my ability to smell. I grieved the loss — one that’s not uncommon after a brain injury or, as we’ve learned from grueling experience, a bout of Covid — and I searched mightily for advice on how to get it back. Months later, an improvised form of brain retraining (basically, sticking my nose into things and telling myself what I was supposed to be smelling) ultimately worked. When I smelled new-mown grass again for the first time, I cried.
Accustomed to having all my senses, I’d been desperate to recover one I had lost. So it seemed reasonable to me that anyone else deprived of one of the senses — especially the ones I considered most precious, sight and hearing — would do anything to get it back, too. Which is why it was a revelation to read, in “Coming to Our Senses,” about people who retrieved part or all of their vision or hearing late in life, and who not only didn’t like it, but who actually suffered and even died as a result.