In this inventive collection of linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. A woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning “Cowboys.” And when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it an accident. Spectacle bears witness to alarming and strange incidents: carnival rides and plane crashes, affairs spied through keyholes and amateur porn, vandalism and petty theft. Steinberg challenges conventional gender roles and subverts assumptions about narrative with a fierce, lyric intensity, as these wounded women stand at the edge of disaster and risk it all to speak their sharpest secrets. A vital and turbulent book from a distinctive voice, Spectacle will break your heart, and then, before the last page is turned, will bind it up anew. (graywolfpress)
