Signs and Wonders, by Alix Ohlin
Check out the reviewlet I wrote for the always wonderful and insightful Fiction Writers Review.
This might not seem like a compliment, but it is: Alix Ohlin is a literary torturer.
In her new collection, Signs and Wonders (Vintage), Ohlin (The Missing Person,Babylon and Other Stories) puts her poor people through the wringer, then takes a wrung-out person and puts him under a flattened-human-sized slide for an intense, revelatory microscopic examination. Then she peels off this pancaked person and twists him like toffee, extracting every last drop of his essence onto the page.
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