Inside Madeleine
by Paula Bomer
Soho Press, May 2014
272 pages / $16  Buy from Amazon or Soho Press

The stories in Paula Bomer’s Inside Madeleine take your hand, tell you a secret, and then burp in your face, giggling. They are honest, playful, and cagey, and the very title of the collection suggests these tonal complexities: while Inside Madeleine refers literally to the various objects one character inserts into her vagina (bars of soap, a rubber ducky, penises), it also suggests something unfiltered, like when a reporter promises to take viewers “inside” an important issue or place. But here, Bomer’s mischief arises again, because programs like Inside Edition (or anything that offers the “inside scoop” on the life of a celebrity) are lurid and full of shit. And so the characters in Inside Madeleine are all these things too: playful, unfiltered, lurid, full of shit. At the beginning of the book, a narrator says that women are “supposed to be nice, well behaved things,” but, thankfully, nothing is nice and well behaved about Bomer’s fiction.

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