An “intriguing and highly original” debut short story
collection—winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
(Booklist). Michael Jeffrey Lee’s stories are bizarre and smart
and stilted, like dystopic fables told by a redneck Samuel Beckett.
Outcasts hunker under bridges, or hole up in bars, waiting for the
hurricane to hit. Lee’s forests are full of menace too—unseen
crowds gather at the tree-line, and bands of petty crooks and
marauders bluster their way into suicidal games of
one-upmanship . . . In Something In My Eye, violence and
idleness are always in tension, ratcheting up and down with an eerie
and effortless force. Diction leaps between registers with the same
vertiginous swoops, moving from courtly formality to a slang that is
the characters’ own. It’s a masterful performance, and Lee’s
inventiveness accomplishes that very rare feat—hyper-stylized
structure and language that offer both clarity and turbulence, never
allowing technique to obscure what’s most important: a direct
address that makes visible those truths we’d rather not see.
“Lee’s stories are intriguing and highly original, with a bent
toward the weird, both in character and worldview. He is a master of
voice, portraying the lives of men who are lost, lonely, and
disturbed.” —Booklist “Lee is very successful in creating a
dream-like, emotionally disconnected state throughout, with
intentionally stilted dialogue and plots that tend to revolve around
forms of symbolic gestures, physical violence, or sexual deviance.”
—Publishers Weekly
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781936747375
Publisert
2014
Utgiver
Vendor
Sarabande Books
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter