Inhale: A Novel in Stories (Volume 25) (Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction)

Inhale is a novel in stories that accumulate until they begin to answer one another: a prologue pulled from static; sutures counted down to the last in triage; permits that rename the living. Here, paperwork decides who moves and who disappears, and those who forge it are not criminals so much as locksmiths: They make the dead mobile so the living can cross. From Gaza’s checkpoints to basements that sweat salt, seawater pools behind the teeth―carried without swallowing, held without speaking. A death certificate is stamped on a body still breathing. Grandma scratches years beneath bowls―1948, 1967, 1987―and lifts one to your ear. In Khan Younis, Shireen stitches; in Shifa, a widow asks for her husband’s papers. Forgetting never gets cheaper here. The sea doesn’t translate; it transmits. You open―just the mouth―hold the water, unspilled, and inhale. “I devoured Inhale the same way the characters in war-ravaged Gaza devour pilfered drugs. The prose is reminiscent of Bruno Schultz, the doomed Polish magic realist who was murdered by the Nazis while still a young man.