Michelle Cliff is a magician. The virtuosity of her plotting, the precision of her prose, bring distant worlds into immediate proximity. One is awed by the beauty of this book, shaken by the cruelties of history it tells.

In Everything Is Now there’s an echo of the familiar that may even seem like an element of cultural property, but Michelle Cliff has the genius of turning the tables on what we thought we knew. Without the lushness and obvious ornamentation often associated with magical realism, there’s often something in a Michelle Cliff story that edges it towards that category. Her stories are grounded in histories, personal and public, with names that help to conjure real souls; however, there’s always a thread of language that pulls the reader into a magical place of silence and space. Cliff leaves numerous small doors opened for us to peer through, but we’re never lost because we are asked to see haunting reflections of ourselves. The stories in Everything Is Now continue to actively beckon long after the book has been closed; they live on in the reader’s psyche, alive with earthly insinuation.

In. . . Everything Is Now, moments are displayed in meticulous cross-section to reveal the depth of meaning in human interaction.

These stories resemble Impressionist paintings, full of sensuous imagery and emotion. Their plots are generally nonlinear, and the shorter pieces look like prose poems. These stories have a compelling beauty which almost distracts the reader from their themes of loneliness, regret, and nostalgia for past dreams that have never been fulfilled.

The stories are like vivid snapshots of moments in time, like memories of events that come into consciousness during one’s daydreams. The richness of Cliff’s fiction is reflected in the changing and contrasting nature of the world she depicts.

Often moving and beautifully written.