In the phosphorescent title novella of Laura Marello's collection, an enigmatic drifter pursues her circuitous path through the intricate cultural terrain of Sweetwater County, California, a patchwork of communities where "everyone speaks the wrong language." Through subtle, disciplined prose inflected with the deep colors and clear lines of ancient Mykonos and the northern Californian coast, "The Gender of Inanimate Objects and Other Stories" depicts the liminal and often surreal states of temporarily rootless people-Old World immigrants, grad students, married sales managers dabbling in adultery at a business conference-who teeter ambivalently on the cusp of freedom as they reach back for the stories and relationships that bind them. Infused with a razor-sharp sense of time and place, Marello's stories connect the core themes of human connectivity-infidelity, sexual identity, childhood, and ever-present memory-with a serene, sometimes sorrowful awareness of the different ways in which we make peace with ourselves.
