The collection’s fourth story, “North Of” (a 2007 Pushcart winner), exemplifies Bertino’s aesthetic. These poignant and darkly funny stories function less as departures from realism than as visions of familiar realities metaphorically enhanced. (College misfits wield superpowers a totemic celebrity and an alienated alien make cameo appearances.) A clever writer with a consistently disarming voice, Bertino commits wholeheartedly to the peculiarities of the worlds she creates and plays them out with verve and precision. Drawing deeply on American pop-culture, Bertino takes quotidian dramas-stories of heartbreak and alienation, depression and fraught familial relationships-and amplifies them with playful and fantastical conceits. The eight stories in Marie-Helene Bertino’s debut collection occupy worlds both recognizable and resolutely askew.
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