Clifford Garstang

[REVIEW] Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, edited by Clifford Garstang

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Everywhere

Press 53

234 pages, $19.95

 

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

 

“You just don’t know who your enemies are. And your enemies are so often your friends, Molly. It will always be like this, I fear,” says Lana, the narrator of Alden Jones’ “Heathens,” one of twenty stories collected from twenty different authors from around the world and edited by Clifford Garstang in Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet.

Lana is an American teaching in a village in Costa Rica. She is well loved by her students and the community, but in the story, she is caught up in teaching a lesson of a darker kind to Molly, a teenaged innocent visiting Costa Rica as part of a group of fly-by Evangelical missionaries.

Lana discovers that the world is dangerous, which is also Garstang’s first thought in his introduction to the collection. These diverse stories range from every continent, from toothless bikers in New Zealand to young women approaching adulthood in the Congo, from a boar attack in a German park to a suicide bomb in Israel. If these stories share a single theme, it is of this danger that permeates our human existence, regardless of our geographic location. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] What the Zhang Boys Know, by Clifford Garstang

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What_the_Zhang_Boys_Know_cover

Press 53
218 pages, $17.95

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

The title of Clifford Garstang’s novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know, is abbreviated from one of the book’s central stories, “What the Zhang Boys Know About Life on Planet Earth.”  While the Zhang boys, Simon and Wesley, are influenced by events long before their lifetimes and places far away, their lives are centered on a questionable part of Chinatown in Washington, D.C. and specifically on a condominium building called The Nanking Mansion.

Despite the title’s implications, the Zhang family is not explored in these stories any more than the other residents of the condominium complex.  Simon and Wesley Zhang, along with the building, serve as a framework to explore an intricately-woven series of relationships between neighbors.  These are people who often appear to have very little in common with each other, at least on the surface.  But all of them have suffered incredible losses.  They are alternately failing and succeeding the rough navigation through life. Continue reading →