The eleven stories in Wendy Brenner's debut story collection concern people who are alone or feel themselves to be alone: survivors negotiating between logic and faith who look for mysterious messages and connections in everyday life, those sudden transformations and small miracles that occur in mundane, even absurd settings.
Brenner's stories range in setting from the rural and southern (a rotating country music bar, a dog track/jai alai compound, a grocery store, a natural cold springs sinkhole) to the urban and high-tech (absurdly bureaucratic companies and academic departments and a food irradiation plant). Often young and tough women seeking to hone their survival sensibilities, Brenner's characters are a mix of the everyday and the fantastic: frustrated secretaries and scientists, a young supermodel, precocious children, fierce plumbers and mechanics, a psychic grandmother, an unhappy lottery winner, a desperate grocery-store mascot in an animal suit. And then there are the animals—real ones of all kinds who turn up at unlikely moments and often seem to be trying to help.
WENDY BRENNER is the author of two books of short fiction, Large Animals in Everyday Life, her first collection and winner of the 1995 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Phone Calls From the Dead. Her stories and essays have appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Magazine Writing, New Stories From the South, Oxford American, The Sun, Allure, Travel&Leisure, Seventeen, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a contributing editor for The Oxford American, and an associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
Table of Contents
The Round Bar • 1 A Little Something • 17 The Oysters • 28 The Child • 40 Success Story • 54 Easy • 67 The Reverse Phone Book • 80 Undisclosed Location • 97 Guest Speaker • 114 Dream, Age Twenty-Eight • 129 I Am the Bear • 138
What People are Saying About This
Padgett Powell
Brenner's work is disturbed, taut, funny, and wise. Better than that, it's good.
