Here Until August

September 30, 2019
The 10 sharp, vivid stories in Rowe’s first collection (after the novel A Loving, Faithful Animal) showcase characters overwhelmed by the harsh and often beautiful places in which they feel not at all at home. In “Sinkers,” Cristian takes his mother’s ashes to the lake that now, courtesy of the hydroelectric company, covers the town where she grew up, and tries vainly to locate her sunken, ravaged home under a lake that “tells him little, dumbly reflecting back the deepening sky.” Severine, the narrator of “Chavez,” consumed by a grief only gradually revealed, runs from France to a grim neighborhood in a North American city, where she is saddled with a mysterious, “wolflike” dog whose owner has left ostensibly for a couple of weeks, but never returns. “What Passes for Fun,” the collection’s shortest story, more prose poem than fully developed narrative, centers on an image of the physical world that serves as metaphor for the whole volume, a sheet of dazzling ice suspended over a pond that has dropped away, apparently solid but actually dangerously fragile. While the characters’ predicaments are often familiar, Rowe’s fiercely idiosyncratic ways of describing scenes will seize and hold the reader’s attention. The disorienting, sometimes fragmented prose mirrors the characters’ sense of ongoing loss and will linger with readers.

June 27, 2019
A man reflects on a life-changing act his brother committed many years ago; a cab driver in America picks up a mysterious passenger who wants to be driven over the Canadian border; a newly married couple carefully navigate a recurring argument in the midst of a road trip. The stories in Josephine Rowe’s third short fiction collection traverse continents and characters, but their connecting thread is how they capture their protagonists at a particular juncture in their lives. Many of the stories in Here Until August hinge on past events or decisions that have somehow shaped their characters’ present, and Rowe effortlessly makes this reflective approach to her storytelling feel captivating and emotionally charged. Her prose is crisp and evocative, and certain lines deftly pin down the small but meaningful moments that define human experience: a wife imagines her husband ‘leaving the house each morning with pieces of himself hidden in his shoes, his coat lining, folded up small between the pages of his lecture notes’; a young woman stands at a window and imagines it as ‘the kind of window where if you just stand for long enough, somebody will come and put their hand on your shoulder’. Here Until August is a powerful and intimate collection that’s sure to hold strong appeal for literary fiction readers.

Carody Culver is a freelance writer, assistant editor at Griffith Review and a contributing editor at Peppermint magazine