The Gender of Inanimate Objects and Other Stories

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.

A dazzling collection-populated by strivers and grievers and criminals and romantics and cheaters and lonelyhearts-that is written in prose that is at once luminous and unflinching. Laura Marello has given us another book that is deeply thoughtful, totally human, wildly inventive, and downright haunting. - Adam Davies, author of Goodbye Lemon

Marello’s eye is a crystal lens, not a ball or mirror. Her powers of observation are anthropological, and this anthropology includes the possible, the magical. Dialogue and events are created with exquisite reality and slant perspective. The readers immerse themselves in this invention-so great is her talent. - Paul Nelson, author of Days Off