March 6, 2017
Arndt’s short stories are delicious flights of fancy, or obsession, or fertile curiosity—or, more accurately, some beguiling combination of all three. All 12 pieces in her debut collection are written in the first person. It could arguably be the same narrator in each, perhaps the author herself—or not. Often the stories seem to end abruptly, albeit usually meaningfully. “La Gueule de Bois” riffs on a trip to Paris, “the city whose sole monument is a comically upturned syringe.” “Jeff” features a brief encounter with Lily Tomlin. “Can You Live with It” juxtaposes musings on Raskolnikov and Crime and Punishment with a kind of pub crawl through various colorful bars. “Moon Colonies” explores tacky, yet strangely beautiful Atlantic City: “In the morning the waves glowed like uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor.” In “Third Arm,” which is full of puckish phrases—“the gag of cars,” “a pudgy dark had descended”—the narrator feels herself at odds with her rebellious body. And in “Together,” the longest and most plot-driven story, a couple contracts a mysterious malady that slowly breaks them apart. This is a playful and provocative collection, full of sly, deft turns of phrase and striking imagery.
March 15, 2017
Teetering between the everyday and the surreal, Arndt's debut collection investigates narratives of the queer body.Many of the unnamed narrators in Arndt's stories defy categorization. Even in their own thoughts, they skitter up to the boundaries of language and glance away, unwilling--or unable--to put a name to their identities. -I'm like a...you know,- attempts the narrator of -Been a Storm- during her brief roadside encounter buying fishing bait from two backwoods misfits. In the sardonic -Jeff,- a chance meeting with Lily Tomlin, who calls Jess by the wrong name, sets off an imaginary battle between Jess and Jeff, the alternative identity she both loathes and longs for. In -Third Arm,- the narrator obsesses over the feeling of -carrying around something that wasn't mine,- while in -Together,- a couple deals with an intestinal parasite taking up room--literal and figurative--in the dregs of their relationship. Nothing in Arndt's worlds is straight. Through the haze of alcohol or drugs or self-loathing hallucinations, characters elbow for space with frightening visions that exist just outside what is real. They morph into animals or become literal representations of figurative language; they flee the instability of inner turmoil only for their existential fears to manifest as larger-than-life visions. Reading Arndt is like walking toward a shimmering desert mirage and being met with a cloud of acid instead of an oasis of cool water. You're not sure what just happened or whether you're the same now that it's over. Maybe you were never there to begin with. A deeply transgressive, riveting shot out of the gate. Arndt is one to watch.
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May 1, 2017
Fellowship-winner and small-press cofounder Arndt tells stories that resemble handfuls of ribbonsvibrant, overlapping, tangled, seemingly more middles than beginnings and endings. Arndt's first-person narrators go unnamed (except bartender Jess in Jess, mistakenly and significantly called Jeff by a famous patron), and their genders are often discussed but generally undefined, making readers comfortable with knowing a little less and understanding that which doesn't conform a little more. In Together, the narrator and a companion struggle with a parasite: where'd it come from, and will it be gotten rid of? In Beside Myself, a driver attempts to gauge a hitchhiking situation's danger, noting, There was a female component in every equation that either made things safer or less safe. In the final, title story, dreamtime visits from walruses convince the narrator to insist on overnight privacy. Arndt's keen, wild stories are truly original, and readers will hope for more.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)