To say that the stories in “White Cat, Black Dog” are influenced by fairy tales isn’t to say very much; they’re influenced by a vast pool of intertextual allusion that includes superhero movies and Icelandic legends, academic discourse, and the work of Shirley Jackson, Lucy Clifford, and William Shakespeare. Few stories in the new collection can truly be said to reinterpret existing tales. One that does is “The White Cat’s Divorce,” which transposes a French tale called “The White Cat” to Colorado, where weed is legal, and replaces a tyrannical king with a Jeff Bezos-esque billionaire, but otherwise stays in the vicinity of the original. Most of the stories, though, are more loosely wrapped around the tales that supposedly inspired them. Were it not for the label “(Hansel and Gretel)” beneath the title “The Game of Smash and Recovery,” few readers would connect that tale with Link’s story of spaceships, robots, and vampires. More than anything, the aim of producing “reinvented fairy tales,” in the publisher’s formulation, seems like such an obvious account of what the stories are doing that those familiar with the author’s work will be put on guard. To read Link is to place oneself in the hands of an expert illusionist, entering a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems.
Spiritually abandoned and lost, readers begin to understand what lies behind the narrator’s obsession—a desire to be unique, to love and be loved in return, to be seen wholly, and to belong to something greater. Direct in its criticism of fan-culture entitlement and philosophical in its exploration of private personas, Y/N also sheds light on a real and shared human experience. The narrator’s methods may be invasive and unethical at times, but readers can empathize with the idea that we’re all searching for a place to land—a source of stability and community. In Y/N’s own words, “What I wanted was something or someone to follow.”
Officially, there is no hall of fame for unhappy families. But even the staunchest Russian novelist might be hard pressed to match the particular gift for dysfunction that the Wilcoxes, subjects of Jess Row’s sprawling metafiction “The New Earth,” display with such impressive esprit de corps across nearly 600 dense and often wildly discursive pages. Death and divorce are a given; immigration, climate change and crises of faith crowd the margins, clambering to compete with a thousand-year conflict in the Middle East. Incest eventually enters the chat, an assiduous but uninvited guest, and race hovers over it all, a quivering question mark. (The impetus for everything, naturally, is a wedding.)
Me? Once way far in time in a village coiled from stone
I met an elder in a teahouse. He proposed, and I said yes
I’ll join you, and we walked together to the vendor of new hearts.