Demons & Divas: 3 Novels

Molinaro is the beloved Marguerite Duras of American fiction and here she strikes again: with great clarity, diplomacy, wit, and poetic grace she cuts to the gendered plays of empire and libidinal politics of desire. Molinaro's fiction, collection by collection, is all of a piece: cosmopolitan, dry, wry, learned, but cutting to the core of the Waikiki night bar or the multilingual streets of New York city and holocaustic mazes of Europe. When Bob Dylan wrote his lyric about seeing Queen Jane, he must have been thinking of this blessed novelist of Jayne steet, this Ursule of the tarot cards and black nails, this goddess in the wilderness of postmodern American letters.McPherson Press is to be applauded once again for its ongoing support of her singular work, as it was (all too belatedly) for its uncanny support of another bypassed US writer, Theresa Cha, now all but appropriated into the identity politics of Asian American banality-- but still a star for all ages and climes, as is Ursule Molinaro. Gratitude and praise are called for from the Pacific islands to Greenwich Village. We need to read her before it is too late,"the groom still waiting at the altar."

Demons & Divas could also have appeared in our fiction section but deserves a place here for its powerful spiritual insights which draw on a wealth of sources from Hildegard of Bingen to Flaubert to provide stories of religious and social insights. A trilogy of short novels provides cautionary tales about everyday saints and believers, injected with a healthy dose of social angst.