Whether she is writing about a couple that reads prophecies on the shells of red-winged blackbirds or an Italian grandma who believes a garlic necklace is a cure-all, McIlwain brings to life a luminous world of plants and animals that even the extraction industries, sleazy bettors and smooth-talking city hunters “with slick cars and six-figure salaries” cannot destroy. Still others make daring leaps in time like “Seeds,” told from the point of view of a man looking at a childhood picture of his recently deceased wife and imagining the traumatic life, “beaten speckled plum” by an abusive stepfather, that lay ahead for her.Ĭharacters in a few stories pop up in others but what truly knits the collection together is McIlwain’s reverence for and knowledge of the natural world. Some are short enough to qualify as flash fiction, others as lyrical as poetry. The first-person-plural of the story is only one of the thrilling narrative devices that McIlwain uses to tell her linked stories. “You Four Are the One” is narrated by Lanie, one of four precocious preteens who spend a summer helping care for a neighbor with a high-risk pregnancy, an all-consuming activity that Lanie declares to be “much more exciting than being at the pool and trying to ignore everyone bikinied who’d `developed.’” A striking number of the 22 stories in the book feature the distinctive voices of young girls and women and center the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and infertility. PRAISE FOR TENDER IS THE FLESH BY AGUSTINA BAZTERRICA WINNER OF ARGENTINA’S CLARN NOVELA PRIZE 2017 From the first words of the Argentine novelist Agustina Bazterrica’s second novel, Tender Is the Flesh, the reader is already the livestock in the line, reeling, primordially aware that this book is a butcher’s block, and nothing that happens next is going to be pretty.

Tender flesh book