I really enjoyed this collection of short stories, with the exception of the longest one which gives the book its title. Most of the tales I found thoughtful, insightful, and intriguing. A good collection, although I was think the author is most masterful with the briefer of the short stories. ( )

a wonderfully weird collection that will delight those who cut their teeth on Edward Gorey, with a voice all her own. ( )

While the idea of each story is imaginative, I found the stories themselves kind of flat, dull and unmemorable. I only read about half of them, so maybe I've missed the hidden jewels, but the ones I read did not inspire me to keep going and hoping. ( )

Except for the title story, most of the works in this collection are very short, and all of them have some sense of strangeness to them, whether it's a truly surreal premise or simply a slightly dreamlike feeling to the narration. As is usual with any story collection, I liked some a lot better than others, but the best of them are compelling, and even the ones that aren't are interesting, in the good sense of the word. The writing is good, too, with a very assured and original voice. ( )

The Unfinished World and Other Stories by Amber Sparks


Amber Sparks is an artist of the impossible, a sort of science fictional sorceress who pursues her unique visions with the mind of a philosopher and the relentless determination of a (pleasantly) monomaniacal miniaturist. In a time in which many short story writers (both inside and outside MFA programs) are unrecognizable from each other, Sparks stands apart. Having published much of her early work online and in journals, she’s now beginning to find a larger audience with her second collection, The Unfinished World and Other Stories.

With conceits that range from custodial sci-fi (“The Janitor in Space”) to an evil, time-travelling “art critic” (“Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting”), a reverie for World War I’s Lost Generation (the beautifully desolate “The Fires of Western Heaven”) to a modern faerie tale about the confusing, even maddening, sexualization women experience moving from childhood to adulthood (“The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies”), Sparks delivers fresh ideas in tellings that are likewise indelibly her own. Her abilities to compress narrative and to weave significant detail into an often poetic prose are impressive, qualities you don’t see in many writers.

Readers of Sparks’s earlier collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, won’t be surprised at how well The Unfinished World succeeds. They will be pleased, though, that her art continues to develop. In that sense, it’s her engagement with the greater world that most impresses, the way her miniatures serve as an examination of the human condition, of our need to connect with the cosmic, to understand our place in the unfinished worlds we must all invariably leave behind.

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/kbaumeister/2016/06/the-nervous-breakdowns-re... ( )