Collectors: A Novel - Softcover

Griner, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1593766378 ISBN 13: 9781593766375

Publisher: Catapult, 2016

Synopsis

From critically acclaimed author Paul Griner comes Collectors, a novel about one woman’s risky fascination with a handsome, enigmatic man. Jean Duprez, an ad agency art director who specializes in effectual but unnerving concepts for her clients, meets the handsome and mysterious Steven Cain at a family wedding. Despite Cain’s marked indifference to her and his unsettling personal history, Jean finds herself drawn to him, confiding her own indiscretions in him despite their having just met. As their liaison continues, it becomes a mirror for the collecting process as well: how goods are bought and sold, who determines their worth, and most importantly, the tense, complicated bargaining between buyer and seller. What is never quite clear is whether Jean is the innocent prey of a dangerous lothario or if she’s deliberately put herself in harm’s way.

In the masterful hands of Paul Griner, Collectors becomes not just a novel about what one woman will risk for love or something like it, but a probing examination of the intricacies of relationship power dynamics, and how they are never quite what they seem.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Collectors, by critically acclaimed author Paul Griner, is an exquisitely menacing story of one woman's dangerous fascination with a seductive, mysterious man. At her cousin's wedding, Jean Duprez, an advertising-agency art director who specializes in effective but unsettling concepts for her clients, meets a handsome stranger named Steven Cain. What follows is the story of a relationship so ominous and puzzling that the reader is drawn into the author's designs as inevitably, and as helplessly, as Jean is drawn to Steven. She seeks him out although he often seems indifferent to her, she disregards his disturbing personal history, and she tells him about her own transgressions. And so it becomes intriguingly hard to say whether she is a possible victim of evil or has deliberately put herself in harm's way. The story also dramatizes the intricacies of collecting, particularly the wary bargaining between seller and buyer. In Paul Griner's hands, t

From the Back Cover:

"Paul Griner's Follow Me is one of the most vivid, distinctive collections I've read in years. His range of subject and technique is extraordinary: patient, complex explorations of family life, flinty fabliaux noirs, stories about doctors and artists and outlaws, all told with conviction and velocity and a sure sense of the form. Mr. Griner's book is a present joy, and a bright promise."

--Tobias Wolff

"Paul Griner is a new American writer of great promise. The stories in Follow Me are pitched at a high level, skillfully
executed and driven through with maximum velocity. Griner's characters are wonderful, and they continue to resonate in the reader's mind long after the collection has been read."
--Thom Jones

About this edition

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1593766378
• ISBN 13: 9781593766375
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176