Departing from the Brothers Grimm to approach our own economically and socially fractured present, Sarah Goldstein's Fables constructs a world defined by small betrayals, transformations, and brutality amid its animal and human inhabitants. We hear the fragment-voices of ghosts and foxes, captors and captives, stable boys and schoolgirls in the woods and fields and cities of these tales. Anxious townsfolk abandon their orphan children to the nightingales in the forest, a bear deploys a tragic maneuver to avoid his hunters, and a disordered economy results in new kinds of retirements and relocations. Goldstein weaves together familiar and contemporary allegories creating a series of vibrant, and vital, tales for our time.
Goldstein s vision and approach is wholly new. Her work in this collection is more than translation and transcription: Fables contains poems that whisper tradition but fully stand on their own.
--NICK RIPATRAZONE, THE IOWA REVIEW
Horrifying and humbling in their imaginative precision, the stories of Sarah Goldstein's collection, Fables, awaken the tension between human and nonhuman in these haunting vignettes.... Entering Goldstein's Fables is good fodder for dreams and the conscience, but be sure not to leave this one laying out for the kids.
--NICK STURM, THE RUMPUS
Goldstein lightly treads up and down the spectrum of delightfully playful to hopelessly grim via vivacious and unsettling possibilities. . . . An important glimpse into contemporary literature, which blends a new subtle style with both nature and the relatable subversive. For fans of Brothers Grimm, Angela Carter, and César Aira
--HEY SMALL PRESS!
In the meadow of fairy tale, Goldstein unrolls ribbons of story that fly gamely and snap with brilliance. Truly worth gazing at.
--DEB OLIN UNFERTH
Sarah Goldstein's fables make me happy, and they'll make you happy too. They're delightfully unnerving: small animals fare poorly; we're bounced to what feel like the settings of the tales of the Brothers Grimm huntsmen and witches wander the landscapes, a magic needle runs away, a finch mends lace and then, wonderfully, there's talk of retirement accounts and urban decay and the sad tale of a dude crushed under his truck whilst fixing its axle. And ghosts! And my favorite: the captives. One captor tells his captive, "you ought to put that voice of yours in a pillow." Thank goodness Sarah Goldstein put her voice into Fables. Honestly, I've never read a debut this stunning.
--JOSH RUSSELL