Learning to Talk

January 1, 2022

A collector of honors, with Stegner, Rona Jaffe, and three Pushcart Prizes among them, Conklin offers a Rainbow Rainbow of short stories about queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans characters like the fifth grader who explores gender identity by dressing as an ox--instead of a matriarch--for a school reenactment of the Oregon Trail. After closing out her twice Booker-honored "Wolf Hall" trilogy, Mantel limns the transformative aspects of childhood in the loosely autobiographical stories of Learning To Talk. Author of the New York Times best-selling Three Women and the deliciously contentious debut novel Animal, a personal favorite, Taddeo offers stories (two Pushcart Prize-winning) grounded in the dating service Ghost Lover, a forwarding system for text messages (75,000-copy first printing). In The Angel of Rome, Beautiful Ruins author Walter highlights crucial moments in the lives of his characters, from a teenage girl aspiring to be like her missing mother to a son who must come out repeatedly to a father facing dementia.

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April 4, 2022
Two-time Booker winner Mantel (Wolf Hall) departs from the broad canvas of Tudor history for a revelatory collection drawing on her childhood in a northern English moorland village. Several center on fraught relationships with parents and stepparents. “You should not judge your parents,” says the narrator, twice, in “Giving up the Ghost.” Mantel quotes Thucydides one moment, Shakespeare the next, or St. Augustine, and high and low fit together comfortably in “Curved Is the Line of Beauty,” in which the narrator remembers seeing the Arthur O’Shaughnessy poem referenced in the title on a jar as a child, which brings solace during a tough time ruled by Catholic guilt and limited means (“we continued to live in one of those houses where there was never any money, and doors were slammed hard”). In “The Clean Slate,” which begins with the narrator working on her family tree with her mother, the narrator reflects memorably on history: “I distrust anecdote. I like to understand history through figures and percentages of these figures, through knowing the price of coal and the price of corn.... I like to be free, so far as I can, from the tyranny of interpretation.” Throughout, the author’s humanity shines through.

June 30, 2022
Two-time Booker winner Mantel explores the landscapes of her childhood in this collection, first published in Britain in 2003. The six stories, set in 1950s-70s industrial northern England, read like personal reminiscences but are filtered through a fictional lens. Mantel calls them "autoscopic" rather than autobiographical. The narrators closely observe their young lives amidst adult tensions, including marital scandals and class, racial, and religious differences. Neighborhood conflicts become a microcosm of Protestant-Catholic frictions, and two girls' experience of getting lost in a junkyard induces musings on emotional rootedness. Standouts are the title story, about elocution lessons for social mobility, and "The Clean Slate," which delves into the mutability of historical memory through reflections on a drowned village. Mantel carves beauty and meaning out of bleakness, crafting brilliant metaphors with penetrating human insights. "The country through which they move is older, more intimate than ours," she writes, describing children's innate knowledge and ability to deduce truths about their world. Read this collection alongside her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003), for more understanding of her life and exceptional creative process.

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Starred review from March 1, 2022

"People's lives have become uncomfortable and insecure, and their future has been taken away," says one character in this expertly crafted collection from two-time Booker Prize winner Mantel, whose loosely autobiographical stories capture ground-down 1960s Britain. Still, Mantel doesn't focus on financial stress or even the stubborn snobbery revealed in the title story, whose young heroine has landed at a posh school and spends years taking elocution lessons. Instead, Mantel clarifies the significance of ordinary lives, showing how each of us is a fuse (burning faster or slower) and how each of us can hurt. A young man finally acknowledges the secrets of his childhood, even as he recalls a troubling neighbor, now dead among "the mauled lettuce rows, out of grief and bewilderment and iron deficiency." A boy realizes that a beloved but difficult dog has been destroyed and that he must remain stoic in the face of another pet's disappearance. A na�ve young woman initially fails to grasp that it's not spooks but something more sinister raiding the fading department store where her mother is ambitiously pursuing a career. VERDICT A highly recommended collection quietly probing our deep, everyday sorrows.

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Starred review from April 15, 2022
Reflections on an enigmatic childhood. In seven deftly crafted stories that she calls "autoscopic" rather than autobiographical, two-time Man Booker Prize winner Mantel takes a "distant, elevated perspective" on her life growing up in the English Midlands region. Organized chronologically, most of the stories are narrated by a woman evolving an increasingly astute perception of her own reality and the truths obscured by family myths and lies. "All the tales arose out of questions I asked myself about my early years," Mantel writes in her preface. "I cannot say that by sliding my life into a fictional form I was solving puzzles--but at least I was pushing the pieces about." They read, then, as lightly fictionalized memoir. In fact, the last story, "Giving Up the Ghost," acknowledges the author's memoir of the same title, published in 2003. Mantel's family situation was peculiar: When she was about 7, her mother moved her lover into the house that she shared with her husband. For the next four years, Mantel lived with two fathers, aware of gossip about her mother's scandalous behavior. Finally, her father left. In "Curved Is the Line of Beauty," the lover is called Jack, with "sunburned skin and muscles beneath his shirt. He was your definition of a man, if a man was what caused alarm and shattered the peace." Growing up was hardly peaceful: In "Learning To Talk" ("true save one or two real-life details"), the 13-year-old narrator is sent for elocution lessons, her provincial accent seen as a liability: "People were not supposed to worry about their accents, but they did worry, and tried to adapt their voices--otherwise they found themselves treated with a conscious cheeriness, as if they were bereaved or slightly deformed." Mantel's narrators are melancholy or resentful, misunderstood or ignored, vulnerable and cynical. "Mercy," one observes, "was a theory that I had not seen in operation." Sharp, unsentimental tales from a writer haunted by her past.

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