Love and Hydrogen

Fülszöveg

É.m,'?:. ¦
FICTION/SHORT STORIES
I've been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidant, and a crappy husband. Among the things 1 do pretty well at this point I'd have to list darts, reclosing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way.
This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, which is a dazzling array of short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen— familiar to readers from publications ranging from McSweeney's to The New Yorker to Harper's to Tin Woüse—encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine.
A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in... Tovább

Fülszöveg

É.m,'?:. ¦
FICTION/SHORT STORIES
I've been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidant, and a crappy husband. Among the things 1 do pretty well at this point I'd have to list darts, reclosing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way.
This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, which is a dazzling array of short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen— familiar to readers from publications ranging from McSweeney's to The New Yorker to Harper's to Tin Woüse—encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine.
A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in a halting, awkward romance; a fascinated and murderous Creature welcomes the first human visitors to his Black Lagoon; and in the title story, the stupefyingly huge airship Hindenburg^Wes to its doom, representing in 1937 mankind's greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure.
Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepard's voice never falters. The virtuosity of Love and Hydrogen CBmenh his reputation as, in the words of Rick Bass, "a passionate writer with a razor-sharp wit and an elephantine heart"—in short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.
"This is one of the most important collections in years, because Shepard does so many things that are all too rare in the medium. He gives us red-blooded characters who leave the living room and fly, kayak, dive, search, and emerge from swamps to devour unwitting campers. Stories about dissolving marriages are fine, but how about two gay engineers on the Hindenburg? Or a nineteenth-century man searching for a giant half-shark/half-whale? These are uniformly bold and exhilarating stories. Let's hope Shepard becomes as influential as he should be. He's the best we've got." —DAVE EGGERS
"These are some of my favorite short stories of the past decade. Reading them is like encountering our national literature in microcosm: multiform and polyrhyth-mic, violent and fanciful, erudite and hard-boiled, built on twin foundations of nostalgia for the never-was, and of that millennial American optimism that is indistinguishable from despair."
—MICHAEL CHABON Vissza