I loved and missed Loved and Missed
I know I write about Susie Boyt’s book like I’m getting paid to do it. I don’t care. If you’ve read it, you know why I do. If you haven’t read it, you should.
Know what? I’ll buy you a copy — if you’re the first to email me about it.
And if you’ve read it, you know how excited I was when I saw that there was more with those characters published in Granta recently. I imagine the story is beautiful even if you haven’t read the book, but NO. Read the book.
Boyt is joined by 6 other authors that are new to me this week — two stories by Jennifer Hudak1, Will Dowd, Angela Liu, C. Christine Fair, Tatum Ozment, and Anika Hickman.
Several of these came from Vanessa Fogg’s blog, check it out and follow along on Bluesky if you hang out there.
Want to submit a story? Please do!
All Being Well by Susie Boyt
The missing chapter from Boyt’s flawless novel Loved and Missed. I read most of this story through tears, I love these characters more than many real people. Read the book, I promise you’ll love it.
There was something about Lily going out into the world, a girl in a hoody with a basket in the forest, hem of her dress caught up in her fingertips, heart pried open so you could almost hear the pumping of her heroic (O positive!) blood type, urging her to receive life without judgement or grudges or speculation . . . Perhaps that was what was unbearable, the sense she would get mashed and pulped like all the other bright heroines, if Jean took her eye off her.
Written on the Subway Walls by Jennifer Hudak
Hudak’s story is tender and moving, especially for a story that’s told from the perspective of an inanimate object. It also sent me to learning a bunch about the Erie Canal:
When machinery cleaved rock and stone, I was born. When steel scraped against soil, creating open space where there had been only darkness, the earth whispered, Look!
I came into being then: a furrow in the ground. A trench. A pathway opened to the chill blue sky. The earth shifted and sighed around me, and named all that I was seeing, which had not existed in the darkness before my birth. Air, it whispered. And birds, and clouds. And then, soon after, water.
Echo Syndrome by Jennifer Hudak
Echo Syndrome is a sci-fi story about a condition that causes people to split into multiples. I won’t write more because the weirdness is part of the allure. I loved this story:
When my daughter climbs in the car, there’s three of her. They shouldn’t all fit in the passenger seat, but they overlap each other to save space. Together they reach for the seatbelt, their movements almost in unison but not quite; their asynchrony makes me slightly nauseous, and I swallow hard before putting the car into gear and inching out of the school parking lot.
The Teacup Stirred by Will Dowd
A man finds an injured bird on his way to work. This is a short, strange story that apparently started as a dream. I’ve read it four or five times and it’s more puzzling each time.
As I fumble with my key, I hear a strange mewling at my feet. A baby bird fallen from a nest in the eves is shuddering on the pavement. It’s squeezing its eyes shut with all its might. Pink and veiny, it weighs about as much as a paper clip when I scoop it up in my hand and place it gently in the pocket of my windbreaker jacket.
Before We Were Born by Angela Liu
This is excellent science fiction, and made me think briefly of Ted Chiang. Like my favourite science fiction, it has less to do with the future than with people. When I realized where things were going I gasped. This is the introduction:
In the summer of 2065, driven by a series of mass agricultural failures and growing overpopulation concerns, the Chinese government announces an exorbitant new tax on families with more than one child. For parents with terminally ill/bedridden children, a new brain–body exchange technology is offered that will allow them to temporarily lend their bodies to their children—an unprecedented chance at adulthood, but at a life-changing cost.
Angry Birds by C. Christine Fair
Fair uses repetition to devastating effect in this short story about two little girls desperate to escape an ugly circumstance in a small town.
Holly and Lucy were angry birds trying desperately to escape the confinement of their corroded cages. They were thirteen and life was waging a war of attrition on them, so, they waged war on life.
Cache-22 by Tatum Ozment
This genre-bending short story caught me off-guard. It’s told by a young woman — a new college grad looking to break into the working world as a computer programmer:
You get used to it after a while, thinking in the ones and zeros. The black and white of a corporate life, shuttled from room to room with the white, fluorescent lights and the beige cubicles of congruence and complacency.
I gave up my writing dreams the second I stepped foot into college.
A Fresh Life by Anika Hickman
There’s a slow, sad reveal of the protagonist’s history throughout this story. Hickman makes Dottie come to life in a lovely and heartbreaking way. Dottie works in a distressed business in a depressed town, but there are faint signs of hope.
Dottie made her way back behind the cash register. Time stretched out with little to fill it. Duffie’s was one of two convenience stores in New Hope, Pennsylvania and most people in town went to the other one. If Dottie had a choice she’d have gone to the other one too. Dottie marked her time by Mrs. Duffie’s nightly shuffle out the door at six, and Darren’s nightly visits. Darren had already been by and Mrs. Duffie would be leaving soon, then there’d be four hours to go.
