70 World Literature Today reviews In the opening story, “The Naturalist ,” McHugh focuses on Cahill, a criminal serving his sentence in a city of zombies. After his community of criminals dies in an explosion, Cahill decides to forgo joining the surviving men in order to live on his own. At first he’s terrified of zombies, but that terror gives way to curiosity until Cahill becomes a postapocalyptic version of Dian Fossey. Cahill lists the things he wants to know about zombies: “Do they eat animals? / How do they sense people? / How many are there? / Do they eventually die? fall apart? use up their energy?” To conduct his research, Cahill creates large bonfires that attract zombies and watches them until the final embers of the fires burn out. Eventually, Cahill begins to trap fellow criminals in order to feed the zombies and watch their reactions. McHugh, in writing about criminals and zombies, does an unexpected thing: she manages to make the zombies a sympathetic creature. After he’s brought back to civilization and told that the zombies are going to be bombed into extinction, Cahill disagrees with the plan. “[They’re] just . . . like animals,” he says to reporters. “They’re just doing what’s in their nature to be doing.” In another story, “Special Economics ,” McHugh uses her time in China to write about the economic dependence people have on businesses . Jieling, a girl from northern China trying to earn a living in Shenzhen, accepts a job at a manufacturing company . The company provides food, shelter, and uniforms, but at a price that makes sure their employees are in constant debt to the company. One of McHugh’s talents is to effortlessly create an unbelievable-yet-close-toreality world in which cell phones are made from plastic sheets dropped in boiling water and households are powered by bio-batteries (boxes containing symbiotic bacteria that convert trash into electricity). With “literary” writers dabbling in genre—Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go are recent popular examples— it’s easy for critics and scholars to assume that genre is a ghetto where you get your cheap goods. But to snobbishly ignore exciting writers like Maureen McHugh is their loss. Armando Celayo Norwich, United Kingdom Kei Miller. The Last Warner Woman. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Coffee House. 2012. isbn 9781566892957 The Last Warner Woman features compelling settings, masterful storytellers , a mystery, colorful characters, and language that resonates with beauty. The novel can also be read as an unobtrusive treatise on storytelling that invites comparisons between Western ways of knowing the world and traditional ways of understanding the world. It is presented not as a contest, but rather a statement of how we see individually and collectively. The story is divided into four uneven parts: part 1, “in which the story begins”; part 2, “in which the story prepares to travel, and then begins again”; part 3, “in which others bear witness to the story”; and part 4, “in which the story invents parables, and speaks a benediction and then ends.” A young girl, Pearline Portious, goes to live in a leper colony in 1941 to make a colony of many colors. Her penchant for knitting doilies with colorful yarn as opposed to the traditional white might serve as a metaphor for the people who belong and those who do not. Pearline Portious gives birth to a little girl, Adamine Portious, who comes of age and moves from the colony to a Revivalists camp (she discovers she has the gift of “warning”), then to London for an ill-fated marriage, then to an asylum for the mad, and back again. The characters encountered along the way are enduring. Like the circular story, each character adds his bit to the telling—some bits seemingly not as relevant as others—yet connected nonetheless. The novel is laced with wonderfully engaging language revealing the spice of each character: “Like many Jamaican market women, Maizy was a creature for whom derision was an art.” It is also rife with subtle humor reflecting the human condition . In England, Adamine’s husband describes her response to his flat offering: “She began unleashing such a string of...