Large Animals in Everyday Life - Softcover

Brenner, Wendy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393316483 ISBN 13: 9780393316483

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

The eleven stories in Wendy Brenner's debut story collection concern people who are alone or feel themselves to be alone: survivors negotiating between logic and faith who look for mysterious messages and connections in everyday life, those sudden transformations and small miracles that occur in mundane, even absurd settings.

Brenner's stories range in setting from the rural and southern (a rotating country music bar, a dog track/jai alai compound, a grocery store, a natural cold springs sinkhole) to the urban and high-tech (absurdly bureaucratic companies and academic departments and a food irradiation plant). Often young and tough women seeking to hone their survival sensibilities, Brenner's characters are a mix of the everyday and the fantastic: frustrated secretaries and scientists, a young supermodel, precocious children, fierce plumbers and mechanics, a psychic grandmother, an unhappy lottery winner, a desperate grocery-store mascot in an animal suit. And then there are the animals--real ones of all kinds who turn up at unlikely moments and often seem to be trying to help.

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0393316483
• ISBN 13: 9780393316483
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 162