We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
The Most of It
by Mary Ruefle
Wave Books, $11.95 (paper)
Geoffrey O’Brien, editor-in-chief of the Library of America, writes, “writing—a part of life and yet not of it—is the medium that permits movement through, across, beyond.” He is referring to Elizabeth Hardwick’s generically hard-to-classify classic Sleepless Nights, but he could just as easily have been discussing Mary Ruefle’s The Most of It. Appearing after ten poetry collections, the book is billed as Ruefle’s debut fiction collection and contains thirty very short stories—or rather, thirty prose blocks that run to the ends of the pages without line breaks. To place the book into a clear generic category is to sell it short, or to suggest that it demands to be read one way and not another. Some of the pieces in this small and marvelous work do, of course, read like straight short stories—such as the “The Diary,” about a young girl growing up on her father’s “diary farm”—but so too do some seem like prose poems, some like essays, and some like all three. Some read like psalms or meditations, and others like little philosophical pensées. In “If All the World Were Paper,” for instance, Ruefle argues that, “long before one of the living comes to such a conclusion—that life is unreal—he first passes through the conclusion that reading is unreal, unreal because it is literally an imaginative act, so much so that no one actually reads.” One piece, “A Romantic Poet and His Destiny,” even veers into the territory of mini-biography, comprising a charming, page-long summary of the life of the poet Heinrich Heine, which concludes, “After he died, his whole estate went to his widow on the condition she would marry again so there would be at least one man to regret his passing.” By turns droll, witty, heartfelt, and fanciful the pieces in The Most of It, whatever you choose to call them, offer something for every taste and temperament, which seems only fitting for a book that is dedicated “TO YOU.”
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. Her most recent books are For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs and After Robinson has Gone.
Contributions from readers enable us to provide a public space, free and open, for the discussion of ideas. Join this effort – become a supporting reader today.
Vital reading on politics, literature, and more in your inbox. Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter, Monthly Roundup, and event notifications.
As Roe is struck down by the Supreme Court, we bring together recent and archival essays to assess what is at stake—and how we might move from reproductive rights to reproductive justice.
Theorist Hil Malatino offers a compelling account of the persistent bad feelings with which trans people often struggle—but it comes with fashionable academic hang-ups that need to be reconsidered.
The systems that harm animals go hand in hand with systems that harm humans. Combating them requires inter-species solidarity.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission