The One Marvelous Thing

Illustrated with Motley's inky, scruffy black-and-white sketches, many of these 29 shorts from poet and novelist Ducornet aim to push readers' buttons, such as the exclamatory narrative by the feral young creature in “Wild Child,” who pretends to “repent” of her savage ways, but secretly wants to run and hunt. Themes of female entrapment recur, as in “Guilia on Her Knees,” the tale of an old sculptor's marriage to a young Italian peasant girl and her removal to a farmhouse in northern Vermont where she spends the rest of her days “scrubbing spattered grease off the floor so that some mean bastard can walk on it.” Another marriage runs afoul in “The Dickmare,” set amid a community of grotesque organisms in the sea, and Ducornet similarly pulls the stops out of her whimsical vocabulary in “The One Marvelous Thing,” about two dissimilar women who go shopping together. These stories spotlight Ducornet's linguistic pyrotechnics and will delight readers who, like Ducornet, can find the beauty in the irreverent and absurd. (Nov.)