Joanna Ruocco

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Art. THE WEEK presents models of minds shaped by the 21st century American realities that they also construct. The stories are unconventional in their arcs and uses of characterization, and in their foregrounding of the instabilities in representational practices; they obsess over life and death, female sexuality and family, the economy and language and try out various forms inadequate to their figuration/expression.

Stark and vibrant, the two halves of this sutured book expose the Frankenstein-like scars of the assemblage we call 'human.' In 'Another Governess' a woman in a decaying manor tries to piece together her own story. In 'The Least Blacksmith' a man cannot help but fail his older brother as they struggle to run their father's forge. Each of the stories stands alone, sharing neither characters nor settings. But together, they ask the same question: What are the wages of being? The relentless darkness of these tales is punctured by hope - the violent hope of the speaking subject.

Fiction. A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS explores the notion of intimate space and the domestic affairs that constitute the proper subject of female knowledge. The prose pieces echo one another, but instead of creating one narrative they rather inhabit a shared terrain, the private realm where the playful, the erotic, the violent are compressed into a single gesture, something as quotidian as cutting the goose's neck for dinner. Through spells, visions, fragments, and tableaux, A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS creates a frightening map of women's wisdom. In these linked stories, two girls 'run, hatless, towards anything, a bridge, a public toilet, a street light, an iron chair'--and the sentences, matter-of-factly, towards the far reaches of the imagination: eerie, gruesome, funny, always delightful.--Rosmarie Waldrop.