OUT OF CLEVELAND
The Women in the stories face their challenges with an extraordinary blend of intelligence, skepticism, and hope Each story shows the entanglement of cause and effect, however these causes and effects are not those of the physical world. They are causes and effects of the movements of the psyche and the actions of the heart--not hammer hits nail, nail penetrates 2X4, but, why is the hammer being held at a certain angle and why is the hammer striking an empty bag and why is the man or woman grasping the hammer in the first place?.
The stories flow with unexpectedness and sometimes a touch or more than a touch of absurdity.
Here are excerpts from a review by Jim Bartley in the Globe & Mail
"[She} quickly knocks the conventional out of the ballpark.
Ninety East takes place in two simultaneous streams of consciousness, each in a vehicle hurtling along a four-lane blacktop. In a single 19-page paragraph, Kuby shifts smoothly between inner worlds: a trucker on a long haul in his 18-wheeler; a woman heading out of Cleveland in her aging Mustang. Speed is the contentious - finally quite superficial - core of their relationship. The hermetic world of solo long-distance driving is Kuby's frame for a portrait of isolation and loneliness, and the heart's risky leap toward new hope.
Poison is a web of complexities. A self-diagnosed paranoiac believes that her tenant, a Turkish medical researcher, is trying to kill her. Thematically dense, and made more enigmatic by its narrator's wild suspicions and garbled logic, the story probes deeply buried currents of racism, making a segue into questions of Jewish denial and acquiescence during the approach of the Holocaust.
Body Image: A Fable is the fabulist's chatty take on a mid-life "fat virgin" housewife. Brenda's husband shakes her awake one morning with the words, "I'm leaving."
In Mysterious Infestations, a Cleveland journalist receives an anonymous 14-page missive describing a woman's bodily infestation with centipedes (they emerge from every orifice) and her plan to escape the curse with an unspecified "self-disposal." Destroying my body [the character says] would be my escape hatch - life's anus, life's tear duct."
The closing story's tragic absurdity is straight from the book of life. A man murders a congenitally disabled child out of compassion and does his jail time, loved and supported through it by the child's mother. When the killer is disabled by his own hand, chance turns his injury into a sort of freedom.
Read an excerpt
Back-cover page and where to buy: OUT OF CLEVELAND
