6 p.m. karaoke, 7 p.m. practice altruism, 8 p.m. gossip
Madeline Cash's Earth Angel is 5 x 7.75 x 0.5 inches & 152 pages.
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Book recommendations really risk betrayal. Friends with good taste are infallible, unless they’re not. Last week, a friend saw I’d just finished a popular, hefty new novel. It’s maybe the one you’re thinking about. Before she could ask I said, “Oh, I’d never recommend it to you.” Her face melted like I’d given her a little gift! She’d tried to read it on vacation and she hated it for being simple, surface-level but not stylish. Worse than the book, she was seething about all the other friends who had told her she had to read it.
(A recent exception: a friend just prodded me to read a book she despised so we could seethe together. It was very rewarding.)
Strangers should be less reliable than friends, but I realize I’ve long relied on one particular, sturdy stranger source for recommendations: book store or library employee endorsements, not in conversation, but written out on index cards taped below the book.
Staff recommendations have fueled a handful of favorite Official Purse Books (Walks With Men, Assembly, Peter Hujar’s Day). And this was how I found a copy of Madeline Cash’s story collection, Earth Angel, at Unnameable I think. Earth Angel is squirmy, girlish, and roguish. My favorite story, naturally, was called “Slumber Party,” where two hired best friends plan an itinerary that I hope to follow closely one day:
Earth Angel feels extremely Contemporary. The stories don’t quite take place in our world, which is maybe why they achieve the rare (fleeting, if you will) quality of actual timeliness. You can’t pin it down. It makes total sense, though you’re not sure it will make sense later, it makes sense now.
A high-flying premise propels almost every story in Earth Angel. The tone is something like if my dreamworld self kept a diary (intimate and remote dispatches on shapeshifting circumstances; lots of distrust). It’s an ironic report from a situation of sincere confusion.
I wish I could remember what the book store note said, but I’m sure it was something like that.
And very good news, Madeline recommends a cadre of favorite Purse Books:
The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan
In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
Amazing, two of them are already Officially Anointed Purse Books!