Everything Inside: Stories
By Edwidge Danticat
(Knopf)
In “Without Inspection,” the heart-rending, final short story of Edwidge Danticat’s collection Everything Inside, a man revisits his life as he falls five hundred feet to his death. Though the actual story—flashbacks aside—all takes place over the course of six seconds, Danticat creates a small, emotionally rich universe. Readers are sure to leave the story with a sense of bittersweet heaviness—and it is a feeling Danticat conjures in each of the eight tales in her new collection. Settings jump from Miami to Port-au-Prince and back; we meet mothers, a pair of ex-lovers, and female friends separated by distance and circumstance. Though the stories are linked by themes of love, death, and family, each is distinctive, gripping, and memorable in its own right, creating a collection that highlights the acclaimed storyteller at her best. (4/5)
By Lydia Wang
Everything Inside: Stories was published August 27, 2019. This article originally appeared in the July/August 2019 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!
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