Sardines: Stories

It is a universal enough truth that human beings are social by nature. There is space within us which normally fills up with relationships and rich experiences. When we are rendered solitary by circumstance or temperament, however, that space fills instead with the symptoms of loneliness. Angel Dionne's dry, observant short stories pull back the lid of that claustrophobic way of life, giving us a vantage on the minor existential pains of people talking most often to themselves.

In this the author's first collection, readers will find twelve tinned tales of a world both familiar and disquietingly austere. For all of her economy of expression, Dionne's investigations into the scenes - hair salon, butcher's, library, zoo, café - and occurrences of everyday life - a read-through of the paper, a conversation at the cash-out, an inquiry into the open job -are meticulously observed. Dionne's story-telling is a kind of narrative atomic theory, in the same philosophical school as the writing of Nancy Huston, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Thomas Bernhard, I. L. Peretz. Life, Dionne shows, is not so abstract or so complex that it cannot be made sense of. With sympathy, wit, and a relentless eye for detail, she demonstrates how to discern the commonplace minutiae of human existence, and how to see the ways they interact and compound until the mundane begins to resonate with human meaning.