The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo's If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective. In "Chestnut Season," a young woman stalled in traffic sees her future self parked beside her; in "Boyfriends," the recently deceased protagonist endures eulogies by her ex-beaus and husbands; in "Mrs. Fargo," a young man faces a reckoning with his first-grade teacher, a suicide, for whom he's harbored a crush and whom he hopes to impress with his worldly successes. The short-short...
The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo's If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have ...
The stories in History of Art examine the definitive, yet paradoxical, preoccupations of humankind-namely art-making and war-and the emotions that underpin both: passion and sentimentality, obsession and delusion, ambition and insecurity, fear and envy. Luongo casts the infamous, famous, and unknown in these sublime vignettes, from Marie Antoinette and John Lennon to the designers of fictional typefaces and the painted soldiers in Stanley Spencer's Great War Memorial. Drawing each work together through the dichotomy of art and war, Luongo also presents a mother who leaves her family so that...
The stories in History of Art examine the definitive, yet paradoxical, preoccupations of humankind-namely art-making and war-and the emotions that und...
