The interconnected short stories of Susan Steinberg's Spectacle push the limits of traditional literary forms while exploring the idea that our major social roles are performances distinct yet not separate from the individuals performing them. Loss and grief are key themes here, as the protagonists of these stories scramble to make sense of events. A daughter is forced to make the call to "pull the plug" on her vegetative father. Pining for a guy, a girl steals his car stereo, realizing only later that the goods are not the boy. The voices of each of Steinberg's protagonists intertwine, creating a collection that manages to become greater than the sum of its parts.
Form and content are interconnected in these stories, as they bend traditional prose and poetic forms while maintaining a piercing clarity of sense. Many of Steinberg's pieces "perform" elements of both poetry and prose without definitively becoming either--much as the protagonists "perform" elements of both guy and girl without ever fully identifying with the performance. Both the characters and the narratives store meaning in the spaces between the conventions, where the silence of a line break or an unspoken thought speaks volumes. At once vibrant and violent, Spectacle takes on unexpected territory and reveals it is all too familiar. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket