Let us hope there are some lights that flicker but never go out, and that Americans - like the British and the Irish - are willing to grope through the darkness and oddity of this gorgeous book. Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19, one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2022, is now out in paperback, along with a thriller about young love in Rhode Island, a history of. It contains only sharp observations and a constant juggling between beauty and decay, moments stretched and skewed like leaded glass. This collection is for wiseasses and weirdos, a cathedral of strange sentences and unfocused meditations built upon the singular experience of being a human being. Bennett’s stateside debut refuses to stoop, to explain, to tempt its reader with superficial ploys. The tilt of Bennett’s pen (or the stroke of her key) lends gravity to anything it touches. Fractured, voice-driven, and prone to modernistic meanderings, Pond is the sort of avant-garde opus destined to put its author on the map alongside modern-day prose stylists of the highest order. Bennett contorts language into new configurations, twisted such that each piece in the collection brings the reader to face a literary frontier and a singular character.
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