Refresh, Refresh: Stories - Softcover

Percy, Benjamin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974856 ISBN 13: 9781555974855

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2007

Synopsis

The war in Iraq empties the small town of Tumalo, Oregon, of men―of fathers―leaving their sons to fight among themselves. But the boys' bravado fades at home when, alone, they check e-mail again and again for word from their fathers at the front.

Often from fractured homes and communities, the young men in these breathless stories do the unthinkable to prove to themselves―to everyone―that they are strong enough to face the heartbreak in this world. Set in rural Oregon with the shadow of the Cascade Mountains hanging over them, these stories bring you face-to-face with a mad bear, a house with a basement that opens up into a cave, a nuclear meltdown that renders the Pacific Northwest into a contemporary Wild West. Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy is a bold, fiery, and unforgettable collection that deals with vital issues of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Benjamin Percy is the author of seven novels – mostly recently The Sky Vault (William Morrow, 2023) – as well as three books of stories and a collection of essays. He has written Wolverine for Marvel since 2017 and is known for his comics runs on X-Force, Ghost Rider, Green Arrow, and Teen Titans. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in GQ, Esquire, Time, Outside, Men’s Journal, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Cemetery Dance. His honors include a Whiting Award, the NEA Fellowship, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, a McKnight Fellowship, the iHeartRadio Award for Best Scripted Podcast, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories.

Reviews

Percy's second collection (following last year's The Language of Elk) traces lives led in rural Oregon's fractured, mostly poor communities. The title story (selected for The Best American Short Stories 2006), presents Josh, a young man from small-town Tumalo who watches as men who signed up as Marine reservists for beer pay leave to fight in the Iraq War, including Josh's father. As Josh's unreliable first person details a deer hunt, the escapades of the town recruitment officer and the less-and-less frequent e-mails from his father, tension slowly builds. Set during a blackout, The Caves in Oregon follows geology teacher Becca and her husband, Kevin, as they explore a network of caves beneath their home, grappling to understand each other in the wake of a miscarriage. Meltdown imagines a nuclear disaster in November 2009, while the menacing Whisper opens with the accidental late-life death of Jacob, leaving his brother, Gerald, to care for Jacob's stroke-impaired wife. Percy's talent for putting surprising characters in difficult contemporary settings makes this a memorable collection. (Oct.)
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The title story in Percy's collection won the Plimpton and Pushcart prizes and was anthologized in Best American Short Stories of 2006, and justly so. In it, the small town of Tumalo, Oregon, loses its coaches, teachers, barbers, and cooks when the army deploys a batallion of part-time soldiers to Iraq. Two of the men's sons, still reeling from their fathers' departure, spend the time boxing as a way to alleviate stress, anxiously awaiting their fathers' communiqués by e-mail. The other stories, also set in rural Oregon at the foot of the Cascade Mountains, all carry a similar thread of emotional desperation. And that pain is inevitably mirrored in a threatening landscape, which here, in one viscerally rendered story after another, includes a mad bear, an eerie underground cave, and a dangerous hail storm. In one of the most boldly envisioned stories, "Meltdown," a nuclear accident has left Oregon a dead zone, unpopulated save for renegades like Darren. He drives down deserted, ash-covered streets because "living with ghosts feels more like a victory, somehow." These are hard-hitting stories from a writer to watch. Wilkinson, Joanne

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555974856
• ISBN 13: 9781555974855
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 249