The Last Time I Saw You by Rebecca BrownCity Lights Books, 2006

These short stories have a distinctive voice: wry narration, strings of synonyms: “I willfully purposefully doggedly […] pursue follow chase desire” (p 28), parenthetical asides. There’s a preoccupation with the past, with remembering and misremembering: in the title story, every concrete detail slips and shifts, the story is one “maybe” after another. (If the facts are as slippery as that, how to begin to consider feelings?) The triteness of relationship angst, of psychobabble: “I am ashamed of all the times I spewed the debris of my ridiculous past on those well-meaning, decent people who tried to love me” (p 18). I liked the title story best, and the grace of “Aspects of the Novel” (about EM Forster and queerness); other stories are less literary, more grotesque: children’s war games, murder, blood and guts.