Make Me Do Things — Victoria Redel

In eleven original, surprising and deliciously dark stories, Victoria Redel moves effortlessly between men's and women's perspectives in stories that explore marriage, divorce and parenthood. A newly divorced mother stumbles her way back into single life. A young man and his girlfriend clean out his dead mother's overstuffed home. A woman struggles to hide her affair from a doting husband and inquisitive daughter. A man descends into a drug-fueled dream as he imagines losing his pregnant wife to a historical, nineteenth century figure. Redel indelibly captures the ways we love, the ways we yearn and the ways we sabotage each. Throughout the collection, children struggle to make sense of the adult world's uncertainties as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, find themselves pressed up against their own limits, “the exaltations and treasons of one's own mothy heart.” Redel has again done what Grace Paley said of Redel's first collection, “Only a poet could have written this prose. Only a storyteller could keep a reader turning these pages so greedily.”