May 20, 2026
Suddenly Light, by Nina Dunic
“Remembering my grip on her arms, hurting her, wanting to shake her, hard, so she would stop being drunk—wipe her face, so she could participate like the rest of us. Participate, like all of us. Didn’t she get it? We didn’t want to be here either. Somewhere between the turquoise eyes and the brown smear were the rest of us.”
Nina Dunic’s short collection Suddenly Light—which follows her award-winning debut novel The Clarion—troubles the space between people, ourselves and others, sometimes perfect strangers, and other times the people we’re closest to. A quiet sadness permeates these stories, but there are moments—like the title says—of powerful illumination, of sometimes fleeting connection. Though these moments are never the crux of things, because the point of Suddenly Light is that life goes on, much longer (and darker and harder) than anyone anticipates at the beginning of it all, when you’re young and on the cusp of everything, the future only possibility, no such thing as compromise. Narrative never quite unfolds the way we imagine it will, and Dunic’s stories show this, the ongoingness, the granular attention to detail, the strangeness and randomness, what participation requires of its players, how much is felt but never said.
