Wife with Knife: leapfrog global fiction prize winner

The speakers in Molly Giles’s Wife With Knife offer their truths with surprising starkness: “[T]he actual heart looks more like a tongue than a valentine” states the grief-flayed aunt of “Agate Beach,” while the careless driver of “Accident” thinks “If I rear-ended anyone in California, I might be sued or shot but I would not be prayed upon.” Many of the stories are not traditional narratives but glimpses of the trouble or healing that lies ahead: teens refusing to heed traffic, lovers staring down death and betrayal and closure. Like a street magician’s trick, Wife With Knife holds out each everyday tragedy or quiet triumph only to replace it seamlessly with another.