Mary Kane - A collection of little stories that brim with the tiny, specific details of a moment -- the cups, the shoes, the scarves, the books -- and the humor, tenderness, uneasiness, sadness, and wisdom that define entire lives

 

Mary Kane, In the Book I'm Reading, One Bird

Books, 2023

A collection of little stories that brim with the tiny, specific details of a moment -- the cups, the shoes, the scarves, the books -- and the humor, tenderness, uneasiness, sadness, and wisdom that define entire lives.

 “It’s not often that I encounter a book that makes me a better reader. But as I read Mary Kane’s In the Book I’m Reading, I entered the book (and the books within the book … and the lives of both the author and her subjects … and her breathless, magnetically poetic prose) so thoroughly that I came away changed. This collection of tiny stories relies on both the universal (which made me feel understood) and the unique (which showed me a new way to look at the world). It made me laugh, broke my heart, thrilled my brain. I’m both a better reader and a better person for it.”— Lauren Wolk, NYT bestselling author of Wolf Hollow, Beyond the Bright Sea, Echo Mountain, and My Own Lightning

“This book knocked my socks off! Unique, readable, relatable, funny, profound: Mary Kane’s stories brilliantly evoke the wonders and absurdities of life, and the ways we are both their source and their subject.”— Lisa Madsen Rubilar, whose award-winning stories include “Obbligato,” “Bathing Mother,” and “A Confession”

“These little stories are like the TARDIS – bigger on the inside. They brim with the tiny, specific details of a moment – the cups, the shoes, the scarves, the books – and the humor, tenderness, uneasiness, sadness, and wisdom that define entire lives.”— Rebecca Siegel, poet and cofounder, Literary North

“I’d never thought of reading let alone existing as counting wild turkeys in the dark, but this book showed me the light. A unique collection of delights, In the Book I’m Reading captures the beauty of the solitary reading life in a way I won’t soon forget.”— Peter Orner, author of Still No Word from You, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Am I Alone Here? Notes on Reading to Live and Living to Read

Adore this book!: I have read it and reread it and reread it yet again. Mary Kane's idiosyncratic writing style reveals her penetrating and sympathetic understanding of human nature. She tosses delicious bon bons into her reader's lap with her references to favorite authors: Camus, Tolstoy, Proust, Mann, Kierkegaard!

Failure is a delicious treat, as is Nude Descending and Cusp. I wish we had a molar-shaped table just like that on the book cover. Her insights into marriage are hilarious because they are not only intimately personal but universally understandable. The mysterious Mr. Leopold's surprise appearances, cats everywhere, fear of poetry — it’s all compelling, intriguing, and very much alive. And funny!

The Joys of Reading resonates because I have trouble retaining information, and have to jot down things I want to remember.

I have enjoyed and reveled in Mary Kane's short poems and stories for several years now, and "In the Book I'm Reading" collects her most delightful and insightful pieces. I'm buying copies for all my reading friends.

Kindle Customer: I read this book of fifty-one micro fiction stories in manuscript form before its publication a year or so ago and then read it again now. The longest of the stories is 9 pages, the shortest one sentence. It’s the kind of book that subtly seeps into your bones. The kind of book you find yourself thinking about months later. I was surprised to discover that my memory of a conversation with my sister about the end of a friendship was in fact one of these stories.

I called it micro fiction, but really Kane’s writing defies the pigeonholes of genera. It’s meta fiction, stream-of-conscience, short fiction, and just the plain love of language. Some are a snapshot of one moment, while others explore the nature of memory, ageing, and marriage and relationships in their ordinary middle. I don’t think its hyperbole to call In The Book I’m Reading a kind of magic in the way it quietly takes hold of the imagination.

Amazon Customer: Mary Kane’s short story collection, In the Book I’m Reading is genuinely unique, a distinction I give to few books I’ve read. Each of the stories in the book takes no more than minutes to read, yet each one packs a punch. Each one is an adventure—you never know where you’ll end up. Over and over, I would ask myself, “How did she think of that?!” But in reality Kane has captured the strangeness, the multiplicity, the absurdity, the holiness and the hilarity of life as we all know it.

Kane’s powers of description are stellar; for instance, the past has “thick shoulders all hunched, teeth in need of brushing, desires growing out all over its body like bent wire sculptures.” And she has a way with creative comparisons, as in, “He sliced the zucchini into thin wheels, enough wheels for an entire traffic jam of miniature automobiles.” The story “Cusp” convinced me that marriage is indeed, in all its details, like “a giant tooth.”

In fact, marriage is a major theme in this collection. Spoiler alert: many of the stories are linked, and feature the same long-married couple. The identity of Mr. Leopold hides in plain sight. The family cat also plays a recurrent role (“Big Cat,” “Animal Behavior”). So does the act of reading, as the name of the collection suggests. I love the way Kane represents an imaginative mind in communication with the minds of other writers. The narrator doesn’t just “read;” she slips into the worlds of her books, just as they enter hers; and it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference (as in “Tent,” “The Joys of Reading,” “Rilke, 2007, At Shaw’s”).

I continually found myself amazed at Kane’s sheer virtuosity with language. The story “In Service,” for example, is a single, effortless sentence that lasts two pages. But Kane’s stories are much more than linguistic dexterity. The stories are quixotic (“The Problem”), meditative (“Osmosis”), and often FUNNY (“A Sad Tale,” “Georgina Lloyd-Atkinson”). Sometimes I laughed out loud ( “New Old Couple”). Sometimes I felt sad (“Influences and Edibles,” “Roy Rogers, Where Are You?”) Some stories left me with a sense of awe (“Portrait,” “Love Story,” “Spider,” “Lamp,” and many others). Often as I reached the end of a story, I simply whispered, “Wow!” This is a book I’ll keep on my shelf to read again and again.

senzel: It will make you laugh and cry and question reality and wonder. The stories are tiny but there is so much in them. Mary Kane is a writer of beauty and genius. With great style and humor, her narrator makes the world disappear. If the whole world knew this little volume, it would be a calmer, happier, and more confused place.

Melissa Weidman: "In The Book I'm Reading" intrigues at first sight - a beautifully-drawn molar poses on the cover like a dressed-up celebrity (spoiler alert: it may actually be a piece of furniture, not a tooth). This gem of a book (are they stories? Poems? Dreams?) draws the reader into an alternate universe of words/images and how they signify. Surprising, gorgeous, provoking, revelatory, hilarious, profound, Kane's delectably skillful use of language provides a reading experience you won't want to end and will never forget!  [amazon.com reviews][