The Garden in which I Walk

This extraordinarily polished and sophisticated story collection investigates the unaccountable ways in which literature and life entwine. In "Three Seaside Tales" a woman at a resort imagines herself in a Chekhov story only to succumb to banal everydayness, and in "Island Time" a young bride inexorably merges with Emma Bovary. Brennan's fictions position their readers at the edge of the known world, opening onto vistas of both erotic promise and ghastly beauty. The voices, youthful and aging, maniacal and restrained, represent our world's lost, scattering their words among surrealistic ruins, as though they have come to inhabit their own dreams. The lovely protagonist of "Saw" inexplicably maims herself with a chainsaw, literalizing in this violent impulse the self-destructive passion of all of Brennan's characters to actualize romance. These characters lead the reader through a charged, personal landscape of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic complexity. Their voices will continue to echo long after the book has been closed.