If these topics and thematics seem difficult, Huang is surely out to shock inasmuch as provide character profiles of those who might be described as off-the-beaten path. “Lady” offers us a stream-of-consciousness viewpoint of a woman in the throes of a sexual assault. “Pasadenia” provides us a brief glimpse into the life of a dominatrix. In “Childhood,” a HIV positive patient masquerades as a psychiatrist and attempts to treat other patients. In “The House Party,” a group of college students attempt to find meaning in a movie whose plot contents the readers never finally get details or, so we are left grasping at what keeps these young and seemingly disaffected students so attentive.
Huang seems to be pushing us toward a sense of the ridiculousness of anthropological ventures, how utterly wrongminded these expeditions toward understanding the native culture could be. In “The Chair,” for instance, we are given a rather historically-inflected account of a unique device created to find out whether or not an aboriginal population possesses more than one tongue, one located at the opening to the mouth and the other located at the anal orifice. Many of the stories are curious, a little bit off-kilter, and leave the reader highly unsettled. In “Pinneola Inn,” for instance, the main character makes friends with a ragtag bunch of individuals who are all in a kind of limbo as they wait out the fates of comatose friends, lovers, and family: “Leslie Barnum‘s daughter jumped off a freeway overpass clutching a bottle of cough syrup Tricia Books‘s mother took a baseball bat to the head during a robbery in a convenience store Lisa‘s twin brother ran a yellow light and slid his motorcycle under the carriage of a UPS truck Henry Paternaski‘s wife tumbled down the marble steps at the public library, hitting her head on the base of a statue of Geoffrey Chaucer” (9). Practically every story involves some sort of death, literal or figurative. The word, “pornography,” further implies a kind of excessiveness and luridness connected with this grief and if we think about the collection as a whole, the pornographic quality perhaps appears in the fact that many of the main characters do little to confront their grief or loss head-on, instead often glorifying or reveling or even succumbing to it. Philip Huang’s A Pornography of Grief is as the title suggests a short story collection focused on loss. (Canada and India so far) in this post, I first review two titles out of the Hong Kong based Signal 8 Press.
I’ve been trying to cast some attention to presses outside the U.S. A Review of Philip Huang’s Pornography of Grief (Signal 8 Press) and Donna Miscolta’s When the De La Cruz Family Danced (Signal 8 Press)
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