![]() ![]() These creature stories stayed in my head-fantastic. Nor do I regret the acrobatic harrow of Jennifer Fliss’s The Predatory Animal Ball flash fiction in Fliss’s hands feels simultaneously epic and dioramic. ![]() According to the 1981 Virago edition, Barbara Comyns “dreamt the idea” for this novelwhile honeymooning “in a Welsh cottage lent to her and her new husband by the Soviet agent Kim Philby in 1945.” Then I devoured her haunting, impeccably grotesque novel, The Vet’s Daughter. I wound up in a zoom room which led to a rabbit hole-and, after climbing back into the regular world, my head included a bookshelf full of Comyns, starting with her first novel, Sisters by a River, which Emily Gould introduced as “a barely fictionalized account of her strange childhood” created to entertain and amuse her own kids while living in London and “working as a cook on a country estate to escape the Blitz.”Ĭomyns’s second novel, Our Spoons Came From Woolworth’s, continues to mine her life, carrying the reader through adulthood, which is to say: a series of ordinary remarkable things, including childbirth, child loss, marital drudgery, peak misogyny, and pets (from newts to foxes). ![]() ![]() I’d prefer to talk about The Others-to dwell on the fact that I lost my Barbara-Comyns-virginity this year, thanks to Richard Mirabella and Kyle Winkler. 1965įorget the books I reviewed for literary journals… ![]()
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