Pittsburgh Quarterly reviews two new AHP fiction collections

Autumn House is excited to share that the Pittsburgh Quarterly‘s “Short Takes” segment recently reviewed Michael X. Wang‘s Further News of Defeat and M. Randal O’Wain‘s Hallelujah Station and Other Stories. Of Further News of Defeat, reviewer Patrick McGinty writes:

It is incredibly reductive to say that a country the size of China—or any country, for that matter—can be captured by a single book. But the characters in Wang’s Further News of Defeat provide an engaging, wide-ranging look at a country where the only thing more common than family and tradition is change.

McGinty goes on to praise O’Wain’s collection with a similar bend:

The characters in the most danger in Hallelujah Station are the ones who don’t know exactly what they need. Many of them are stuck in a bad spot, as is the case at the beginning of “Just Like Blue Velvet”: “The apartment that Walter had until recently shared with his wife was on the fourth floor in a neighborhood where windows without plywood were a luxury.”

Like the characters in Wang’s collection, those in O’Wain’s stories live in a country known as a superpower. But the superpower these characters must possess is the ability to survive another day.

We’re very grateful to Patrick McGinty and the Pittsburgh Quarterly for this lovely review of Further News of Defeat and Hallelujah Station! Read the full article here.