In “Pinneola Inn,” for instance, the main character makes friends with a ragtag bunch of individuals who are all in a kind of limbo as they wait out the fates of comatose friends, lovers, and family: “Leslie Barnum‘s daughter jumped off a freeway overpass clutching a bottle of cough syrup Tricia Books‘s mother took a baseball bat to the head during a robbery in a convenience store Lisa‘s twin brother ran a yellow light and slid his motorcycle under the carriage of a UPS truck Henry Paternaski‘s wife tumbled down the marble steps at the public library, hitting her head on the base of a statue of Geoffrey Chaucer” (9). Practically every story involves some sort of death, literal or figurative. The word, “pornography,” further implies a kind of excessiveness and luridness connected with this grief and if we think about the collection as a whole, the pornographic quality perhaps appears in the fact that many of the main characters do little to confront their grief or loss head-on, instead often glorifying or reveling or even succumbing to it. Philip Huang’s A Pornography of Grief is as the title suggests a short story collection focused on loss. (Canada and India so far) in this post, I first review two titles out of the Hong Kong based Signal 8 Press. I’ve been trying to cast some attention to presses outside the U.S. A Review of Philip Huang’s Pornography of Grief (Signal 8 Press) and Donna Miscolta’s When the De La Cruz Family Danced (Signal 8 Press)
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