The Unfinished World and Other Stories
Amber Sparks
[Liveright]
If you are not a fan of the inventive, you will struggle to participate in Amber Sparks’ avant-garde brand of story-telling. The Unfinished World and Other Stories deals with death, or the little deaths that strip us of our love and innocence. Her characters’ nightmares and reveries manage to address the violation and loss we feel in this physical world, and how we fight time in an attempt to balance that hurt – as in ‘Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting’, where a time traveler repeatedly interferes with an artist’s creative process in order to protect him from a perilous end.
Though Sparks has a penchant for darker tales, her unique way of weaving legends allows us to experience her obscurities with a smirk. Take the story of an unwed teenage mother told almost entirely in the form of algebraic equation: “If John is three, and John’s mother is six times his age, how old was John’s mother when John was conceived in the back of Al Neill’s pickup truck after a Styx concert in Milwaukee?” If you delight in the imaginary – and in narratives that border on fairytale and science fiction – the spaces that Sparks creates in The Unfinished World are worth falling into. Her stories are like bugs trapped in Amber; moments of life for us to explore outside of time.
Words: Emma Price
