Ladies and Gentlemen - Hardcover

Ross, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307270718 ISBN 13: 9780307270719

Publisher: Knopf, 2011

Synopsis

After his widely celebrated debut, Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross now presents a darkly compelling collection of stories about brothers, loners, lovers, and lives full of good intentions, misunderstandings, and obscured motives.

A hotshot lawyer, burdened by years of guilt and resentment, comes to the rescue of his irresponsible, irresistible younger brother. An unsettling story resonates between the dysfunctional couple telling it and their listening friends as well. A lonely professor, frequently regaled with unbelievably entertaining tales by the office handyman, suddenly fears he’s being asked to abet a murderous fugitive. An awkward but nervy adolescent uses his brief career as a child actor to further his designs on a WASPy friend’s seemingly untouchable sister. A man down on his luck closes in on a mysterious, much-needed job offer while doing a good turn for his fragile neighbor, with results at once surreal and hilarious. And when two college kids goad each other on in an escalating series of breathtaking dares, the outcome is as tragic as it is ambiguous.

Laced with glimmers of redemption, youthful energy, and hard-won wisdom, these noirish stories unspool purposefully and fluidly; together they confirm the arrival of—as Michiko Kakutani put it in The New York Times—“an enormously talented writer.”

About this title

Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2011: "Boys can't stay mad at each other about girls for too long. That's a job for men." Adam Ross's new collection of short stories, Ladies and Gentlemen, is filled with moments of such prickly poignancy, headshaking disbelief, and melancholic side glances. Ross, the author of last year's Mr. Peanut, has nearly perfected this thoughtful style of prose with a punch. The title story, about a woman contemplating an affair with a college crush, has an air of overwrought introspection, but ends with a surprisingly heartening notion of marriage. "Futures" follows a downtrodden middle-aged man as he searches for a job and mentors a young neighbor in whom he sees a younger version of himself, ending in a horrifying, if hilarious, job interview. In "When in Rome," a story of two brothers--one perfect, one not so much--Ross describes the vast expanse that can exist between siblings, as "a birthright that's as strong and arbitrary and ineluctable as love," and one realizes that this could illustrate Ross's feelings on life itself: "Because we feel we must honor this accident of our relatedness, we try to swim against it again and again." Each story a completely singular vignette, Ladies and Gentlemen is a darkly pleasurable read. --Alexandra Foster

About the Author

Adam Ross lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and their two daughters.

www.adam-ross.com

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0307270718
• ISBN 13: 9780307270719
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256