Elizabeth Ellen's new collection Fast Machine is billed in some of its promotional materials as an "anthology." And even though it's written by just one woman, that label makes sense. It's a dense little brick of a book whose insides have been chopped up into dozens of short stories, many no longer than a paragraph. The stories all feel taut and inwardly focused. The women in these stories—and they are, with very few notable exceptions, women—range in age from childhood through middle age. Some of them are from relatively comfortable backgrounds (at least, comfortable enough to be sent to boarding school) and others are addicts who live in filthy squats.
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