And Yet It Moves

The ever-present, everyday magic in Stalcup’s debut collection overlays the mundane world like mist and blurs the lines between the prosaic and the fantastic, in stories that examine life and loss. These losses include a lost child in “Einstein,” in which a dying Albert Einstein writes letters to the daughter he gave away when she was two years old (Stalcup’s choice among the many theories about what happened to the girl, whose true fate is unknown); the loss of self by the hired author of suicide notes in “Ghost Writer”; and lost opportunities in the nonspeculative missed-connections world of “Brightest Corners.” But loss flows alongside restored hope. In “Keen,” professional funeral keener Maeve sings for an otherwise lost soul, and in “Galileo, Hawking, Rabinowitz,” budding physicist Elizabeth Rabinowitz is determined to hunt down the Theory of Everything despite the sexist behaviors of her fellow scientists. Stalcup’s fabulist prose-poetry takes readers on tours of today’s dreams and Nikola Tesla’s memories, her writing surreal but solid enough for the reader to lean against. Stalcup’s work has primarily appeared in literary magazines, but this collection will easily find a home with readers of speculative fiction. (Aug.)