Synopsis

Campbell’s work is a trenchant, irreverent, and voice-driven collection, which opens in an emergency room, continues with a narrative of family mythology, and is followed with stories of economic class prejudice, gender oppression, and critiques of journalism, the Supreme Court, protestors, and English majors. In an unconventional turn to faith in the face of the narrator’s flirtation with determinism, closing essays explore questions of the actual accuracy of storytelling and propose a more transcendental acceptance of the incertitude of life. The arrangement is more artful than expository and often reads, “smart, subtle, dark, and yet funny,” as was said by award-winning novelist John Dalton of one of its pieces. Essays within have been called both “searing,” by Dorothy Parker’s Ashes and “intentionally offensive,” by Fourth Genre–each of these expressions considered a badge of honor by Campbell–and more than a dozen of its pieces have published in other literary journals.

Photo credit: John-Mark Kuznietsov