The Bookslinger app has been updated with a new story!
The story today comes from Everything Flows by James Greer, published by Curbside Splendor. The nineteen stories range from short and surreal to long and surreal, but all share a consistency of intent: to fracture traditional narrative tropes and reassemble the shards into coherent, if occasionally undulant and meandering forms (see: the title). Greer mixes anachronistic pseudo-history and unserious/serious digressions into pop culture, pop physics, pop philosophy and pop music (see: the title), to arrive at something both universal in scope and intensely personal, twisting language(s) into sometimes-strange shapes to devise new ways of looking at familiar things.
Today’s short story comes from Limber by Angela Pelster, published by Sarabande Books. Pelster’s startling essay collection charts the world’s history through its trees: through roots in the ground, rings across wood, and inevitable decay. These sharp and tender essays move from her childhood in rural Canada surrounded by skinny poplar trees in her backyard to a desert in Niger, where the “Loneliest Tree in the World” once grew. A squirrel’s decomposing body below a towering maple prompts a discussion of the science of rot, as well as a metaphor for the ways in which nature programs us to consume ourselves. Beautiful, deeply thoughtful, and wholly original, Limber valiantly asks what it means to sustain life on this planet we’ve inherited.