The characters in Brenner's sharp, witty debut story collection-winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction-come out springing, with voices as stimulating as a blast of cold air in the freezer aisle of a Winn-Dixie. In her chosen world of revolving country music bars, dog tracks, hotel swimming pools and food irradiation plants, Brenner's band of misfits, loners and uncommon individuals cope with longing, loneliness and other pitfalls of late 20th-century life. In "The Round Bar," a short, fat country singer in a tractor cap puts the moves on his sometime girlfriend while his wife and baby wait back home in the double-wide. Tiptoeing breathlessly out of her static, neatly organized life, the lonely brochure-stuffer of "Success Story" starts an affair with the hunky brother of the girl upstairs. An "outraged, overeducated" woman who dresses as a polar bear handing out ice cream cones in a supermarket has a run-in with the local supermodel in "I Am the Bear." Many of the protagonists are acutely observant, big-boned women who know their own minds but aren't quite sure what to make of those around them. "Delicate, well-groomed men often treated me this way," one says. "As though I were likely to breathe up all their air or just fall on them like a tree." By turns determined and resigned, they find comfort in strange places: a fat neighbor's gentlemanly face; the memory of secretly recorded sex on an erased audiotape. Chock-full of pitch-perfect dialogue and dead-on descriptions. Brenner's stories, intoxicatingly original, are precise life studies that linger uncannily in the upper right-hand corner of the mind. Author tour. (May)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
In this collections, a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Brenner breathes life into very ordinary people. Frustrated loners, they relate briefly and badly to strangers while remaining distanced from family, friends, and significant others. Yet they survive to find strange connections to other people, animals, and events. In "A Bear's Life," for instance, a woman who dresses as a polar bear to promote ice cream at a grocery store finds that she can "look through beauty and ugliness to the true...hearts of all men," while the protagonist of "The Round Bar" relates simultaneously her affection for men and dogs. These stories, which have appeared in such publications as the New England Review and Southern Exposure, are at once witty and graceful, and their little sorrows are delived with a light touch. Recommended for public libraries.Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, Md.
Stunning….A wonderful, frontal in—your—face irony runs through these stories, the effect of fearless writing that is intelligent and honest and generous….While even oysters and insects sing in Brenner's fiction, the people and her language sing louder, in rich voices filled with wisdom and awe.Ploughshares
Her prose is at times as moving and mean as broken bottles….an impressive collection.Atlanta Journal—Constitution
Not merely clever but smart, not merely intriguing but actually meaningful….We have nothing to fear for the future of the short story.Boston Book Review
Brenner's stories probably won't change the world, but they might change the way you look at it.Athens Observer
The latest Flannery O'Connor Award winner offers a first volume of 11 stories (most originally published in literary reviews) featuring odd young women and men dealing with loss, failed relationships, and the difficulties of adulthood.
Brenner's female slackers don't cultivate their eccentricities; they're just ill at ease in the ordinary world and often find themselves attracted to men of dubious charms. The narrator of "Round Bar," a lover of men and animals, follows her married boyfriend from a bar in Florida where he performs back to his native Nashville, where she waits in a hotel to spend fugitive moments with him. The young woman of "A Little Something" falls for an older man with a really good line, one smoothly suggesting a sense of the miraculous. The narrator of "Easy" finally bails out of a relation with a violent bully. Lack of ambition plagues Brenner's twentysomething young women: The typist in "Undisclosed Location" feels extra-worthless when the fat slob down the hall scores big in the state lottery. A drab secretary in "Guest Speaker" invents a new self to present to a visiting speaker whom she must chauffeur from the airport. And in "I Am the Bear," a young woman who hands out ice cream samples in a supermarket while wearing a bear costume loses her job by offending a local celebrity. Brenner's hapless protagonists struggle against their own fears—of wildness, of passion, of danger, and of recklessness. The men in these tales are equally awkward and uncertain: The grad student in "The Oysters," working on a project in Agricultural Science, is frustrated in his love for his married prof and begins to feel like the oysters he's studying. The college-educated waiter in "The Reverse Phone Book" experiences so deep a "chronic unease with the normal pace and pitch of the world" that people assume he's retarded.
Quirky, challenging tales and an impressive debut.
An impressive first collection. . . . Valuable, regenerative human desires and sympathies are expressed and discovered in this collection.
Brenner is especially adept at portraying bright twenty-somethings consigned to jobs in the service sector, humanities majors and would-be artists who seek love but don't count on finding it. . . . Brenner's achievement in these ironic, understanding tales is making sure that even the small losses her characters suffer do not fail to move us.
New York Times Book Review - Polly Morrice
Large Animals in Everyday Life is worthy of a prize named for Flannery O'Connor. Like that of her benefactress, Brenner's work is disturbed, taut, funny, and wise. Better than that, it's good.
author of Typical - Padgett Powell
Not merely clever but smart, not merely intriguing but actually meaningful. . . . We have nothing to fear for the future of the short story.
Boston Book Review - Alex Chisholm
An impressive first collection. . . . Valuable, regenerative human desires and sympathies are expressed and discovered in this collection.
Large Animals in Everyday Life is worthy of a prize named for Flannery O'Connor. Like that of her benefactress, Brenner's work is disturbed, taut, funny, and wise. Better than that, it's good."--Padgett Powell, author of Typical
"The characters in Brenner's sharp, witty debut story collection—winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction—come out springing, with voices as stimulating as a blast of cold air in the freezer aisle of a Winn-Dixie. . . . Chock-full of pitch-perfect dialogue and dead-on descriptions. Brenner's stories, intoxicatingly original, are precise life studies that linger uncannily in the upper right-hand corner of the mind."--Publishers Weekly
"Brenner is especially adept at portraying bright twenty-somethings consigned to jobs in the service sector, humanities majors and would-be artists who seek love but don't count on finding it. . . . Brenner's achievement in these ironic, understanding tales is making sure that even the small losses her characters suffer do not fail to move us."--Polly Morrice, New York Times Book Review
"Not merely clever but smart, not merely intriguing but actually meaningful. . . . We have nothing to fear for the future of the short story."--Alex Chisholm, Boston Book Review
"Her prose is at times as moving and mean as broken bottles. . . . Brenner is a writer of large talent."--Diane Roberts, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Brenner breathes life into very ordinary people. . . . These stories are at once witty and graceful, and their little sorrows are delivered with a light touch."--Library Journal
"An impressive first collection. . . . Valuable, regenerative human desires and sympathies are expressed and discovered in this collection."--Booklist
"Quirky, challenging tales and an impressive debut."--Kirkus Reviews
