The Heat and the Hot Earth
By Adam Gnade
61 pp., 4x5.5, saddle stapled
From the publisher:
Adam Gnade's new novella is about the story within the story. Waking
time and dream dissolve into one as his characters navigate an
interconnected world of long conversations, transmissions into the void,
and horror stories told firsthand.
Even for a story concerned with stories, this is a book gill-packed
with detail and minutiae; it's a dense, humid, crowded America--pocket
dials and celebrity magazines, suburban parking lots and border
crossings, a Civil War ghost story, a wedding and a mercy killing, a
crowded street full of industry and an angry Russian tumblr-ing her way
through spring break. It's about the disappearing ground of love and the
endless nightmare of endless nights alone, the book's inhabitants
looking at a lostness they can't quite articulate. (As says the
vacationing Russian Eva Neveski, "What I see is this: miserableness, no
joy, lack of god. Young people without direction, stuck in apartments,
doing drugs, afraid to quit bad jobs. Everyone either wasting away like
skeletons or getting cartoonishly fat. The few (the vast minority) who
'know what they want from life' striking out alone and scattering
themselves across the globe.")
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