Northern California’s Peg Alford Pursell is the founder of Why There Are Words, a Bay Area series of public literary readings, and the independent publishing house WTAW Press. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Award.
Her debut work, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow, is a collection of flash fictions, ranging in length from a few lines to a few pages, many of which have been previously published in literary journals or anthologies. They often read like poems, with the alliteration, colors and imagery lending more resonance to the prose than you usually find in short stories. First and last lines are especially incisive, like the phrase that opens “Petal, Feather, Particle,” about a single mother on her way to a hotel to calm her daughter down: “Show her a flower, a bird, a shadow, and she will show you what is simultaneously forming and falling apart.”
Plot is incidental and largely secondary to language and emotion here, but many of the pieces share a topic of shaky relationships, and the bonds that last in life versus the ones that fade away. Young female first-person narrators frequently alternate with third-person stories about older women, but a recurring theme throughout is how others view you versus how you see yourself. Especially in the context of long-term relationships, these characters have to keep life from going stagnant by staying in motion and living mindfully:
Just as in marriage. He didn’t believe in stopping, resting, or pausing. Drive was everything. Look at the fat bumblebee busy on the flower stalk: the creature anything but in repose, gathering nectar for all it’s worth before moving on to the next. That was how to be in the world. (from “At the Flower”)
Likewise, “This is what familiarity demands: that I examine every detail again as if new clues will present themselves,” a woman thinks while looking at photographs of her daughter (in “The Girl in the Picture”).
A few of my favorite stories were “Day of the Dead,” which mixes Mexican traditions with the narrator’s own bereavements; “Girl on a Hobby Horse,” in which a woman meditates with her Buddhist daughter after her own 14-year relationship breaks down; and “A Weak Light Shining through the High Small Window,” about a woman visiting her brain-injured husband in the hospital and imagining their future together.
The final piece, “Inscription of Time,” reminded me most of Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises with its picture of a woman who has lost many family members and friends yet gains a necessary sense of closure when a former lover, a race car driver who once had an accident that left him in a temporary coma, invites her to his apartment to say a proper goodbye. “It was as if he’d understood what she hadn’t known until that moment. That she needed an ending.”
It may be only 70 pages long, but this book packs a poetic punch. Its images and lines linger, and it deserves to be read slowly and mulled over. I’d recommend it to readers of Tessa Hadley and Desiree Cooper, and fans of flash fiction in general.
Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow was released by ELJ Editions on March 31st. My thanks to the author for sending a PDF copy for review.
My rating: 
The “dark flood” is D.H. Lawrence’s metaphor for death, and here it corresponds to busy seventy-something Fran’s obsession with last words, obituaries and the search for the good death as many of her friends and acquaintances succumb – but also to literal flooding in the west of England and (dubious, this) to mass immigration of Asians and Africans into Europe. This is my favorite of the five Drabble books that I’ve read – it’s closest in style and tone to her sister A.S. Byatt as well as to Tessa Hadley, and the themes of old age and life’s randomness are strong – even though there seem to be too many characters and the Canary Islands subplot mostly feels like an unnecessary distraction. (Public library) 
In Discworld belief causes imagined beings to exist, so when a devious plot to control children’s minds results in a dearth of belief in the Hogfather, the Fat Man temporarily disappears and Death has to fill in for him on this Hogswatch night. I laughed aloud a few times while reading this clever Christmas parody, but I had a bit of trouble following the plot and grasping who all the characters were given that this was my first Discworld book; in general I’d say that Pratchett is another example of British humor that I don’t entirely appreciate (along with Monty Python and Douglas Adams) – he’s my husband’s favorite, but I doubt I’ll try another of his books. (Own copy) 
In a reprise of childhood holidays that inevitably headed northwest, Bunting takes a series of journeys around the Hebrides and weaves together her contemporary travels with the religion, folklore and history of this Scottish island chain, an often sad litany of the Gaels’ poverty and displacement that culminated with the brutal Clearances. Rather than giving an exhaustive survey, she chooses seven islands to focus on and tells stories of unexpected connections – Orwell’s stay on Jura, Lord Leverhulme’s (he of Port Sunlight and Unilever) purchase of Lewis, and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s landing on Eriskay – as she asks how geography influences history and what it truly means to belong to a place. (Public library) 
Mackie’s husband was Houseman and then Administrator at Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk in the 1980s – live-in roles that demanded a wide range of skills and much more commitment than the usual 9 to 5 (when he borrowed a pedometer he learned that he walked 15 miles in the average day, without leaving the house!). Her memoir of their first year at Felbrigg proceeds chronologically, from the intense cleaning and renovations of the winter closed season through to the following Christmas’ festivities, and takes in along the way plenty of mishaps and visitor oddities. It will delight anyone who’d like a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a historic home. (Own copy) 
When life unexpectedly took the middle-aged Lerner back to her hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, she spent several years sitting in on her mother’s weekly bridge games to learn more about these five Jewish octogenarians who have been friends for 50 years and despite their old-fashioned reserve have seen each other through the loss of careers, health, husbands and children. Although Lerner also took bridge lessons herself, this is less about the game and more about her ever-testy relationship with her mother (starting with her rebellious teenage years), the ageing process, and the ways that women of different generations relate to their family and friends. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that every mother and daughter should read this; I plan to shove it in my mother’s and sister’s hands the next time I’m in the States. (Own copy) 
Guite chooses well-known poems (by Christina Rossetti, John Donne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge et al.) as well as more obscure contemporary ones as daily devotional reading between the start of Advent and Epiphany; I especially liked his sonnet sequence in response to the seven “O Antiphons.” His commentary is learned and insightful, and even if at times I thought he goes into too much in-depth analysis rather than letting the poems speak for themselves, this remains a very good companion to the Christmas season for any poetry lover. (E-book from NetGalley) 
I started too many books over Christmas and have sort of put six of them on hold – including Titus Groan, which I’m thinking of quitting (it takes over 50 pages for one servant to tell another that the master has had a son?!), and City on Fire, which is wonderful but dispiritingly long: even after two good sessions with it in the days after Christmas, I’ve barely made a dent.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (for BookBrowse) [Feb. 7, Grand Central]: “Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in [the] early 1900s. … [A] sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history.”
Gypsy Moth Summer by Julia Fierro [June 6, St. Martin’s]: “It is the summer of 1992 and a gypsy moth invasion blankets Avalon Island. … The Gypsy Moth Summer is about love, gaps in understanding, and the struggle to connect: within families; among friends; between neighbors and entire generations.” – Plus, get a load of that gorgeous cover!
The Awkward Age by Francesca Segal [May 4, Chatto & Windus]: “In a Victorian terraced house, in north-west London, two families have united in imperfect harmony. … This is a moving and powerful novel about the modern family: about starting over; about love, guilt, and generosity; about building something beautiful amid the mess and complexity of what came before.” – Sounds like Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth…
A Separation by Katie Kitamura [Feb. 7, Riverhead Books]: “A mesmerizing, psychologically taut novel about a marriage’s end and the secrets we all carry.”
Poetry Can Save Your Life: A Memoir by Jill Bialosky [June 13, Atria]: “[A]n unconventional coming-of-age memoir organized around the 43 remarkable poems that gave her insight, courage, compassion, and a sense of connection at pivotal moments in her life.”
Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002) by David Sedaris [May 30, Little, Brown & Co.]: “[F]or the first time in print: selections from the diaries that are the source of his remarkable autobiographical essays.”
More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers by Jonathan Lethem [Mar. 14, Melville House]: “[C]ollects more than a decade of Lethem’s finest writing on writing, with new and previously unpublished material, including: impassioned appeals for forgotten writers and overlooked books, razor-sharp essays, and personal accounts of his most extraordinary literary encounters and discoveries.”
Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre, edited by Tracy Chevalier
Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye
The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell
If I could recommend just one book from the recent flurry of Brontëana, it would be Charlotte Brontë: A Life by Claire Harman, which I 
