Bobcat and Other Stories - Softcover

Lee, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143182331 ISBN 13: 9780143182337

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2012

Synopsis

At turns heartbreaking and wise, tender and wry, Bobcat and Other Stories establishes Rebecca Lee as one of the most powerful and original voices in Canadian literature.

A university student on her summer abroad is offered the unusual task of arranging a friend's marriage. Secret infidelities and one guest's dubious bobcat-related injury propel a Manhattan dinner party to its unexpected conclusion. Students at an elite architecture retreat seek the wisdom of their revered mentor but end up learning more about themselves and one another than about their shared craft.

In these acutely observed and scaldingly honest stories Lee gives us characters who are complex and flawed, cracking open their fragile beliefs and exposing the paradoxes that lie within their romantic and intellectual pursuits. Whether they're in the countryside of the American Midwest, on a dusty prairie road in Saskatchewan, or among the skyscrapers and voluptuous hills of Hong Kong, the terrain is never as difficult to navigate as their own histories and desires.

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2013: How do you judge a short story collection? By its consistency? How often you laugh? Or by the number of times it breaks your heart? With Bobcat and Other Stories, the answer to the last question is seven, which is the number of stories that make up Rebecca Lee's first short story collection (and hopefully far from her last). The title story is perhaps the best example of what Lee does best. An innocuous dinner party reveals to the narrator that her marriage is disintegrating (or were those signs always there?). She says her honeymoon "haunted our marriage a little, mostly because it was a little sad for reasons I couldn't comprehend and felt I shouldn't disturb." Bobcat is a tricky balancing act. Lee has a knack for nuance, but never lets her subtlety dull the emotional punch. Even as her characters wrestle with tragic internal dilemmas, there's a distinct sense of humor that perseveres throughout. Bobcat and Other Stories is one of the strongest collections I've read in recent years. --Kevin Nguyen

About the Author

Rebecca Lee is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The City Is a Rising Tide and the short story collection Bobcat and Other Stories . She has been published in The Atlantic and Zoetrope, and in 2001 she received a National Magazine Award for her short fiction. Originally from Saskatchewan, Lee is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is now a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0143182331
• ISBN 13: 9780143182337
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224