In these otherworldly landscapes, characters resort to extreme survival strategies to navigate the terrors of adulthood, one opting to live in a lightless cave and another methodically setting out to recover total childhood innocence an automaton discovers love and has to reinvent language to accommodate it filial loyalty is seen as a dangerous weakness that must be drilled away and the distance from a cubicle to the office coffee cart is refigured as an existential wasteland, requiring heroic effort. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking sentence, we watch as the narrator' s marriage and his sanity unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide.Īs the collection progresses, we move from more traditional narratives into the experimental work that has made Ben Marcus a groundbreaking master of the short form. In " Watching Mysteries with My Mother," a son meditates on his mother' s mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by her side. In the dystopian " Rollingwood," a divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In the hilarious, lacerating " I Can Say Many Nice Things," a washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing workshop on board a cruise ship. From one of the most innovative and vital writers of his generation, an extraordinary collection of stories that showcases his gifts- and his range- as never before.
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