Lydia Yuknavitch is the greatest living writer and this book helps to cement that. ( )

I’m getting soft. Maybe it’s the ongoing strain of the pandemic or my solitary life or the annoyance of the cat retching in the carpet, but I find reading ugly things quite off-putting.
This is an ugly book.
It grabs at you, it pulls you under, it makes you gradually want to hate even more about your life.
Masterfully done, but I don’t know that I need to read more about prostitutes or banal sex involving various spurtings to transport me. I wonder if any artist can be so without a series of years in addictions of one sort or another. From my white bread world, lacking in abusive childhood or molested present, not addicted to anything except maybe chocolate, it makes me despair of ever having anything interesting to say. Privilege is so boring.
So I stopped partway through. There is so much ugliness in the world today I feel the need for redemption instead- not the sugar-pasty redemption of feel good poetry or maxims, but maybe, maybe, a tale of a life that wasn’t so grim as to break ones knees on the floor. Can’t there ever be a glimmer of light, somewhere? ( )

Breathtakingly beautiful, brutal, gritty, deep — some of the very best writing I have ever seen. I can’t say enough about these stories but I can’t quite get it exactly right. Visceral, tough to swallow, sometimes dangerously erotic while also nauseating. Her voice so clear like a whisper in my ear revealing secret places. This one will be hard to beat. ( )

Great writing. Not easy stories but such great writing! ( )

I am almost completely taken with Lidia Yuknavitch’s books. Her memoir, The Chronology of Water, gave my mind a great twist as she took me through all the excesses, surprises, and varieties of her earlier life. Her newest novel, Thrust, impressed me all through it, but I still haven’t got a grip on what she was actually doing in the book, or how she did it all. With the stories in Verge, I was loving how extremely creative her writing was, as she leaped from style to subject with some fascinating characters. This promises to be a wonderful book to dip back into, time and time again for a thrill.

Here are a few lines that lodged in my mind, with each story's title noted.

The Pull
"In the water the swimmer feels weightless. The of the pool fills her ears and holds her body and shuts out the world. Swimming is her favorite state of being. On land, the swimmer can barely breathe."
[Being a swimmer herself, she often writes about swimming and water. I love the images.]

A Woman Object (Exploding)
"She goes into the bathroom and removes her bra and underwear from beneath her clothing and stuffs them into the medicine cabinet. She emerges from the bathroom some new animal that no one has ever seen before. Everyone notices her."
[I found this sexy and curious in its effect on the other partygoers.]

Cusp
"The people I went to school with had no meaning to me. Books continued to house me in a way that the world did not."
[Connections in life are interesting in how they form and last. After losing my wife and best friend, books grew even larger in my life ... the lifelong bookseller say.]

Shooting
"Year four. Road tripping. Somewhere near the coast. A roadside park. Redwoods and tree needles, and California had a smell."
[My nostalgia for California will always be a part of me.] ( )