Interims

Cydney Chadwick's recent collection of short fictions mark a change in her work, and a radical deepening of her critique of our edge-of-a-new-millennium culture. Always dark-edged, her stories now have an intense chiaroscuro effect. Her characters are trapped in a ritualized interplay between the empowered and the powerless. And yet, this is not the fiction of fragmentation or divided selves. Instead, it is the fiction of identity held like a closely-guarded secret, barricaded against the assaults of the world. In Interims, Chadwick's fictions are brave, incisive, and often disturbing. Her landscapes are rendered in deep focus, are unrelenting and disquieting--forcing the reader to take stock of the subtle and insidious changes in a world that repeatedly isolates and dehumanizes.