C Magazine

Helen DeWitt: Some Trick: Thirteen Stories New Directions, 2018

1 All quotes are from Some Trick: Thirteen Stories by Helen DeWitt (New York: New Directions Books, 2018).

by Helen DeWitt is itself a bit of a trick. Thirteen being an auspicious number, the reader is obliged to attribute some significance to the volume of narratives in this collection about the strange characters and compromises that make up the worlds of art and publishing. Indeed, DeWitt’s stories are often about probability and her interest in numerical calculations frequently works as a vehicle for exploring analogous aesthetic and literary formulas. These rules, as one

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