In today's good read, checkout the trenchant litarary reviews at Seeking Control and Connection | The Brooklyn Rail: A few excerpts: "Language and its limitations come back in the final story, “Phonetic Masterpieces of Absurdity,” where Nadine, a professional prostitute, claims that she understands “moans better than she understands words” because “with sound you get something that language can’t hide. With sound, you get the feeling underneath the words.”
Oria’s characters don’t always have the correct words to say to one another, but they seem always to be trying to reach the magic words that will make everything okay. A common motif in the stories is this: characters calculating what they say to one another to inflict the least amount of trauma to their relationships, to keep things going as they are. There is a fear of disrupting the status quo, a desire to keep everything the same, to control the uncontrollable—humans and relationships will change, and Oria’s characters fight those inevitable changes, even though they almost always fail to exert real power on other people’s actions and their feelings about those actions.....
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