A Compendium of Domestic Incidents — Joanna Ruocco

Fiction. A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS explores the notion of intimate space and the domestic affairs that constitute the proper subject of female knowledge. The prose pieces echo one another, but instead of creating one narrative they rather inhabit a shared terrain, the private realm where the playful, the erotic, the violent are compressed into a single gesture, something as quotidian as cutting the goose's neck for dinner. Through spells, visions, fragments, and tableaux, A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS creates a frightening map of women's wisdom. "In these linked stories, two girls 'run, hatless, towards anything, a bridge, a public toilet, a street light, an iron chair' and the sentences, matter-of-factly, towards the far reaches of the imagination: eerie, gruesome, funny, always delightful." Rosmarie Waldrop."