Large Animals in Everyday Life

Read Large Animals in Everyday Life Storyline:

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.From Publishers WeeklyThe characters in Brenner's sharp, witty debut story collection-winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction-come out springing, with voices as stimulating as a blast of cold air in the freezer aisle of a Winn-Dixie. In her chosen world of revolving country music bars, dog tracks, hotel swimming pools and food irradiation plants, Brenner's band of misfits, loners and uncommon individuals cope with longing, loneliness and other pitfalls of late 20th-century life. In "The Round Bar," a short, fat country singer in a tractor cap puts the moves on his sometime girlfriend while his wife and baby wait back home in the double-wide. Tiptoeing breathlessly out of her static, neatly organized life, the lonely brochure-stuffer of "Success Story" starts an affair with the hunky brother of the girl upstairs. An "outraged, overeducated" woman who dresses as a polar bear handing out ice cream cones in a supermarket has a run-in with the local supermodel in "I Am the Bear." Many of the protagonists are acutely observant, big-boned women who know their own minds but aren't quite sure what to make of those around them. "Delicate, well-groomed men often treated me this way," one says. "As though I were likely to breathe up all their air or just fall on them like a tree." By turns determined and resigned, they find comfort in strange places: a fat neighbor's gentlemanly face; the memory of secretly recorded sex on an erased audiotape. Chock-full of pitch-perfect dialogue and dead-on descriptions. Brenner's stories, intoxicatingly original, are precise life studies that linger uncannily in the upper right-hand corner of the mind. Author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalIn this collections, a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Brenner breathes life into very ordinary people. Frustrated loners, they relate briefly and badly to strangers while remaining distanced from family, friends, and significant others. Yet they survive to find strange connections to other people, animals, and events. In "A Bear's Life," for instance, a woman who dresses as a polar bear to promote ice cream at a grocery store finds that she can "look through beauty and ugliness to the true...hearts of all men," while the protagonist of "The Round Bar" relates simultaneously her affection for men and dogs. These stories, which have appeared in such publications as the New England Review and Southern Exposure, are at once witty and graceful, and their little sorrows are delived with a light touch. Recommended for public libraries.?Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, Md.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.