From Library Journal's Best Books 2018: Short Stories

Veteran author Slouka’s deeply affecting collection is often melancholy but never sentimental, even as characters contend with losses both small and enormous. A recurring young protagonist, the son of Czech immigrants (as is the author), is particularly engaging as he grapples with his emerging awareness of family dynamics during late-1960s lakeside summers.

I didn’t really know what to expect from this collection of short stories, but I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. Each story was very interesting, each of them coming from different walks of life, in different settings, and with vastly different plots. But even though each story was different and unique, they all flowed so nicely together. The author’s writing is phenomenal and worked very well with the stories being told. Each of the stories had this incredible atmosphere. However, a few of the stories had bizarre time jumps or side thoughts that were hard to follow. And as much as I loved each of the stories, I wasn’t very excited reading them. They were all pleasant, but not enough to warrant a higher rating. Overall, I would highly recommend this book, and I will likely try to pick up some of his other works in the future.

'Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.'

The stories in this collection are moving and an expression, in a sense, of life and encroaching death be it through grief or aging. In The Hare’s Mask a son is drawn to his father’s past, having been the sole survivor in his family of the Holocaust. It is the saddest in the collection and beautiful. “Even as a kid I wanted to protect him, and because he saw the danger in this, he did what he could.” The use of a rabbit hutch in the story is disturbing and so beautifully written I felt it long after I finished reading. When two lovers run into each other in Then, much older now, life having run its course the way it should they reminisce, fill each other in about what happened in between their parting, spouses, children. In parting she asks to be remembered as she was “Then”, and he does, sharing with the reader their passion like a blazing fire. Youth too is a burning, as painful as deep love. Time feasts on us, and we’re never quite as painfully alive as the early years.

Russian Mammoths reminds us everything is taken away from us without mercy. Working in a garden, the narrator interacts with Ecuadorian children who wait by the fence for the bus every morning, until tragedy strikes. These are each beautiful and affecting, it is at times the living and dying we all face that haunts us more than any wildly crafted tale.

Publication Date: June 26, 2018

W.W. Norton & Company