Louise Marburg truly understands people and
the human condition. Her prize-winning collections of literary short stories, The
Truth About Me and No
Diving Allowed, offer deeply perceptive, telling stories of ordinary people,
good people, who face tests in life (challenges often thrust upon them), forcing
them to navigate complex emotional landscapes.
Building on her strengths,
she continues to travel a similar path in You
Have Reached Your Destination, a stellar collection of twelve short
stories that won the 2021
EastOver Prize for Fiction.
Marburg mines the lives of women protagonists
of various ages who face myriad dilemmas that elicit unexpected twists, turns and life detours: In “Alouette,” a 32-year-old woman faces the travails of conceiving a
child she’s not even sure she wants—counseled by modern medicine and a psychic.
In “The Weather of Menopause,” a female artist--affected by the angst of middle-aged--becomes
riddled with insecurity that totally exasperates those around her. Family hierarchies
take center stage in “Even-Steven,” where an adult stepdaughter tries to help
reconcile the life of her terminally ill, 59-year-old step-mother—the two
resent, but also like each other. The story, “June,” centers on an apparently
thriving 91-year-old widow and mother. When a young couple moves into her apartment
building, right next door, the contentiousness of the couples’ relationship brings
back feelings from June’s past and forces her to question herself. What could
have been and what actually is collide in “Dance, Rockette,” where a dinner
party points up disappointments in how life turned out for a married couple
with young children: the husband longs to return to his former glory days, while
the wife invents an exciting (hilariously fictitious) past for herself. In “Double
Happiness,” a happy accident reroutes a rather disoriented young woman who had fallen for a
new love on Tinder… until she meets another man at a party—one who might or
might not be who and all he claims to be. And in the title story, “You Have Reached Your Destination,” a single woman from New York
City is summoned to Baltimore to be with her older brother after he suffers a debilitating
heart attack. A judgmental, rebellious niece and a visit to the home where she once
grew up suddenly reframes the past amidst the chilling reality of the present.
Marburg’s concise, wry storytelling is first-rate.
Each protagonist experiences a controlled chaos of loss and grief that
is buoyed by Marburg’s unique brand of levity--levity that illuminates absurdities of
the human condition on the road to enlightenment.
You
Have Reached Your Destination (Short Stories) by Louise Marburg
EastOver Press,
$20.00 paperback, 9781958094006, 168 pages
Publication Date: November
10, 2022
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this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE