I Am Alien to Life

This supple collection from Barnes (1892–1982) shaves the themes of lost innocence, unrequited love, and death of her modernist masterwork, Nightwood, into febrile confessions. In “A Night Among the Horses,” a groomsman falls impossibly in love with a woman who tries in vain to make him into a gentleman, and his determination to stay among his horses leads to a stark outcome. The dialectologist at the center of “A Perfect Murder” meets a trapeze artist who claims to love dying and to regularly come back to life, prompting him to test her abilities by killing her. In “Spillway,” a tubercular woman outlives her prognosis only to feel she is no longer human, and the frustrated wife of a gynecologist in “The Doctors” propositions a peddler with the words, “You will miss the thorns but do not presume to show it.” A dark philosophy frequently emerges, suggesting from the ruined characters’ perspectives that people are interchangeable with beasts, death is life’s great motivator, and the best a woman can hope for is to become a monument to thwarted ambition. These memorable sketches unfurl a barbed wisdom of the grave. (Oct.)