Honestly, this one fell really flat for me. It was just not capable of holding my attention and I gave up on it less than halfway through. This was a DNF for me.

This story collection was definitely below average from what I usually read, The first near half of the book was the novella. It was meant to be a past and present comparison piece on many different work with what the woman in the story was experiencing. It just ended up feeling like it was all filler for me with all of the referencing that chopped the story up into pieces. . I was not a big fan of the stream of consciousness feel and how it did not really go anywhere.. The stories were halfway decent though and it was kind of sad that they were tied to the novella piece because I felt that they would have shown on their own. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley.

Difficult to get into this book at first, but worth the effort.
Thank you, Net Galley for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review..

Lily Tuck always captures my interest and keeps me turning the pages keeps me totally involved with the story the characters.I have read novels by this talented author now have enjoyed her novella and short stories.#netgalley#heathcliffredux

Enjoyed this collection of stories about people living, loving and trying to make sense of their lives. Particular mention to the last, ‘Labyrinth Two’, which is centred on a photograph, with the story imaging their lives.

A lot of the negative reviews I saw for this book had to do with the fact that it wasn't Wuthering Heights. I never read that, so that wasn't an issue for me. However all of the quotes and dialog from the original were downright distracting (particularly the "footnotes" in red). I also didn't like the author's voice. Everything was so monotone! This happened, and then I said this, and he said that, and then this other thing happened.... BORING! Where was the passion? Where was the connection? I swear, one minute Cliff and the housewife (is her name Cathy? I don't even remember even though I finished it last night) were standing in the kitchen talking, and the next he's kissing her. And the very next, the author is telling me the multiple places where they had sex, and that her husband is also having an affair, which she seems to have absolutely no feelings about. WHAT? That doesn't make any sense. It was also weird that she couldn't tell her own kids apart.

I enjoyed the one with the photograph a bit more- it seemed to have more of a story to it, though most of it seemed very suggestive. I wish there had been more imagination used basing it off of a single picture, or maybe not mention the picture at all and write a purely fictional story about four new friends out for the night in Capri. I wanted to know more in the Dead Swan short. I feel like I missed something in Carl Schurz Park, and that there could have been so much more to that story, especially since it had dual narrators at one point. I think I was confused because in the synopsis it said " returns to haunt the present"... but the guy recalls his dog making a mess of a statue and nothing else? And I would not have known what The Natural State was about at all had I not read the Goodreads description.

All in all, I'm just glad it was short.

I always like a good short story. A novella is pretty great too when you want a quick read, but with this collection, I just couldn't get into it. With the novella and the short stories, there wasn't that moment in each where you get excited to find out more or where you are surprised because it took you someplace you didn't expect. I don't know why these stories seemed to fall flat, but it certainly isn't something I want to reread in the future.

I had never heard of Lily Tuck but was intrigued by the premise of “Heathcliff Redux,” the title story in her new collection—a modern riff on “Wuthering Heights” where a woman currently re-reading the Emily Bronte book falls under the spell of her own contemporary Heathcliff. I did enjoy that story, as well as the others in this short book, particularly “Carl Schurz Park,” and will look for any other Lily Tuck collections in future. Her writing is clean and clear and the stories were unusual and weirdly compelling.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press/Grove Atlantic for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

I always enjoy reading collections by new authors, and was not let down by this one. It had an interesting novella and then some other quite as good short stories. I look forward to seeing more work by this author.

Heathcliff Redux is a prose collection made up of one novella and four shorter stories, the latest effort from experienced novelist and National Book Award for Fiction winner Lily Tuck. Somewhat fatefully, I had just finished Wuthering Heights (review here) when I popped onto NetGalley and found it sitting in my recommendations. While I am sure that I’m not supposed to admit this, I’m often intrigued by modern retellings or fan sequels of classic works, and still being in a Brontë sort of mood I decided to pick this one up.

Wuthering Heights, especially the raw and self-destructive tension between Heathcliff and Cathy, is tough to emulate. Heathcliff Redux fails. In fact, for such a bland, harlequin-style romance to claim that it has revived Heathcliff is something of an insult. If I knew that the focal narrative of this entire work, the only reason I was interested in the first place and to which more than half of its pages are dedicated, follows a middle-aged American housewife having an affair with a hot dude who rides horses and has a tattoo of a dragon on his ass, I wouldn’t have bothered. I went in hoping for the danger, the miscommunication, the violent and unstoppable attraction, and instead was met with this:

"It is had to describe how handsome Cliff was, how sexy, and how attracted I was to his lean, dark good looks, to his muscular body, to his hard, flat stomach, to even his tight tattooed ass." (Page 71)

My Grandma likes to read cowboy romance, and I don’t judge her for it. If reading about a swarthy guy with only a bad boy image makes you happy, then daydream away. I’m the first to admit that one of my most enduring literary crushes is Rhett Butler, so I can see the attraction. However, I came to this book expecting Heathcliff Redux, not Heathcliff if he was a Quiet Horse Guy.

The tenuous and ill executed link to Wuthering Heights may have been expiated by a well-written or compelling work, but I am afraid that Heathcliff Redux is neither. Stylistically it is something of an information dump, with much of its detail being told in indifferent declaratives that come one after the other, and the sentence structure is sporadic and convoluted.

Labyrinth Two, another inspired work which is based on Roberto Bolaño’s short story Labyrinth describing a photograph of people sitting around a table, is better. Its prose is more glamorous, its characters less Mills and Boon. The Dead Swan follows a woman who finds the eponymous dead swan by a pond and decides to take it home with her, forming an inexplicable link between it and her failing relationship with her abusive partner. Carl Schurz Park is excellent, and I truly wish that all of the short stories in this collection could have been like it. Four wealthy white boys throw a black girl in the river to die after picking her up for sex. It is visceral, blunt, and frightening, digging up memories of reading Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates. The final story is A Natural State, where a woman’s reminiscence about her sexual experiences is punctuated by strangely accurate emails from a spammer.

While Carl Schurz Park does make me intrigued as to what else Lily Tuck is capable of, I cannot say that I am impressed by what is comprised in Heathcliff Redux.

This short story collection is primarily a novella along with three other pieces of short fiction. The principle story is a Wuthering Heights retelling.

Lily Tuck shares a novella that revolves around modern life and literary history, while also entertaining and challenging the reader with three additional stories by the collection's end. Well worth the read. Lily Tuck proves to be an author worth visiting, and these stories are delectable and well-written.