Jack Lessenberry, Professor of Journalism at Wayne State University, and a contributing editor and columnist for The Metro Times, The Traverse-City Record Eagle, and The Toledo Blade who also works for Michigan Radio and has published widely in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Oakland Press, has just published a short and sweet review of Have We Possibly Met Before? And Other Stories in HOUR – Metropolitan Detroit’s Monthly Magazine. Here’s an excerpt from Lessenberry’s take on the book:
[…]…exquisite portraits in miniature […] often laced with delightful black humor and surprise endings of a sort familiar to anyone who is fond of the O.Henry style of fiction. Most of their themes are the ordinary stuff of daily life: love and loneliness, greed and sorrow, sexuality, betrayal, child obesity, deceit, even murder as misplaced revenge. While Piontek’s fiction often leaves the reader open-mouthed at their conclusion, the events in them are all easily imaginable. A woman who deceives her lover in an effort to persuade him to leave his wife, while, at the same time, his wife is deceiving him. The haunting murder of a small girl’s guinea pig and what it says about the cruelty of children and within families. The title story, which is the most haunting and most European of the collection, recalls the horror that has shaped and defined so much of the modern age. […]
See the full review by clicking on the image below:
Susanna Piontek holds us spellbound by her mastery of the form of the narrative miniature. Our human, all-too-human traits are the hunting ground for her psychological tracings. In her short stories she reveals herself as a master of surprise endings, illusion-free descriptions of settings and black humor.