Improbable Outcomes

Some Trick is a short story collection full of people pushing up against the literary world or the art world or any of the other narrow-minded "worlds" that determine what creations can be called art. Painters and writers in these stories, some of which have been sitting on a hard drive since the 1980s, have to fight to preserve their talents from what the market wants. DeWitt's great subject is the cost of selling one's work-how easily skill is squandered when the work from a singular mind becomes "cartoonified and fatuous" for the market. The stories reveal a joy in knowledge, and beneath that, an acknowledgement of the refuge it provides from a world so difficult to fathom that it might as well be stupid. DeWitt's own interest in reading beyond a narrow canon of American fiction has also given her a curiosity about technical expertise that most fiction writers avoid.