Short Fiction–Swimming

Peace Corps Worldwide carried the following review of Karl Luntta’s Swimming from SUNY press.

One thing is certain for foreigners at work in much of Africa: the proverbs can be as colorful as they are vague, utilitarian as they are vexing. The truth can emerge—or remain obscured—with a single phrase. Truth, in these proverbs, lies in the eye of the beholder.

This principle is at work in the eight stories of Karl Luntta’s Swimming, each of which churns beneath the surface with traces of hidden truth. Whether his characters are far removed from the world we know—like Maag, digging his own grave at the edge of the Kalahari—or are much closer to home, Luntta’s characters bristle with both confidence and confusion. From Boston’s suburbs to an overnight train deep inside Botswana, the darkened room of a children’s sleepover to the cracking ice of a winter’s pond, Luntta gives us protagonists struggling to assign meaning to the world around them.

Full Review

For more on the work of other Peace Corps affiliated writers: PeaceCorpsWorldwide