Winner of the inaugural Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award
These are the best Americans, the worst Americans. In these stories (these cities, these people) there are labyrinths, rivers, wildernesses. Voices sound slightly different than expected. There’s humor, but it’s going to hurt.
In ‘On Paradise, ‘ a petshop manager flies with his cat to Las Vegas to meet his long-lost mother and grandmother, only to find that the women look exactly like they did forty years before. In ‘The Spooky Japanese Girl is There For You, ‘ the spooky Japanese girl (a ghost) is there for you, then she is not.
These refreshing and invigorating stories of displacement, exile, and identity, of men who find themselves confused by the presence or absence of extraordinary women, jump up, demand to be read, and send the reader back to the earth changed: reminded from these short stories how big the world is.
Table des matières
Roadblock
Strangers on Vacation: Snapshots
Machulín In L.A.
On Paradise
Domokun in Fremont
The Women Who Talk To Themselves
Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote
Your Significant Other’s Kitten Poster
Well Tended
Souvenirs from Ganymede
The Coca-Cola Executive in the Zapatoca Outhouse
Correspondences between the Lower World and Old Men in Pinstripe Suits
The Lead Singer Is Distracting Me
Errands
Liner Notes for Renegade, the Opening Sequence
Hobbledehoydom
My Sister’s Knees
The Spooky Japanese Girl Is There For You
Big Wheel, Boiling Hot
After the End of the World: A Capsule Review
Debtor
Forsaken, the Crew Awaited News from the People Below
Northern
Best Worst American
A propos de l’auteur
Juan Martinez’s stories have been published in Mc Sweeney’s, Glimmer Train, Conjunctions, Huizache, Ecotone, Tri Quarterly, and broadcast on Selected Shorts. He lives in Chicago with his family and is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. His website is fulmerford.com.