Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

<p>From the celebrated author of <em>You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine</em>,a thought-provoking, often unsettling story collection that consists, broadly, of narrative diagrams of the three main stages in a human life: birth, life, and death.</p><p>Alexandra Kleeman€s debut novel <em>You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine</em> earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and Tom Perrotta. It was praised by the <em>New York Times</em> as "a powerful allegory of our civilization€s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation." </p><p>In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of "living" where we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and the death-y period toward the end where we sense it is ending and will end only partially understood, at best.</p><p>The title is taken from one of the stories ("Intimation"), but is also a play on Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality"€"only in this case it€s not clear exactly what is being intimated, but it€s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. The middle, "Living" section of the book, is fleshed out with a set of stories that borrow more from traditional realist fiction to illustrate the inner lives of the characters. </p><p>At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as its characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house-party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood. </p><p>Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, <em>Intimations</em> is an utterly transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant young writers.</p>