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. (Kirkus Reviews)
Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, these stories are quirky takes on contemporary life in which animals, not always large, lurk around the edges.
"I like animals and I like men" begins the hopelessly-in-love narrator of "The Round Bar," who follows her married country singer to Nashville in her own version of a down-and-out song. In "The Oysters," Pat Boone"not the Pat Boone"laments his love for his newly married professor, while delivering oysters to be irradiated. The oysters themselves are having a hard time deciding whether irradiation is a gain or a loss. Wendy Brenner triumphs in capturing all the normal oddities of life; and in the magic of a few words a bizarre but accurate images he creates our lives and how we live and breathe.
"Brenner's work is disturbed, taut, funny, and wise. Better than that it's good."--Padgett Powell
"Her prose is at times as moving and mean as broken bottles. . . . Brenner is a writer of large . . . talent."Diane Roberts, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wendy Brenner is a professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, New England Review, and other literary journals.
"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
"Intoxicatingly original."Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award
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