The Apple's Bruise
Stories
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, a moving, disturbing, and utterly original collection of stories that examine a universe where memory and fact collide, and the imagination fills in the gaps left behind.
The stories in The Apple's Bruise take a smart and unflinching look at love, frailty, and happiness and prove beyond doubt that Glatt is a modern master at blending heartbreak and hilarity. In "Dirty Hannah Gets Hit by a Car," a seven-year-old girl bullied by a neighbor across the street gains strength after a serious accident; in "Animals," a zoo veterinarian from a family of butchers tries at once to deal with his marital problems and the high rate at which his animals are dying; and in "Soup," a young widow tries to reconcile her feelings for her teenage son's friend, the town delinquent.
With tenderness, insight, and humor, Glatt casts her gaze simultaneously on the beauty and the absurdity of our humanity, creating unforgettable portrayals of unusual characters and the complexities of desire and fidelity that compel them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Passive-aggressive and not so passive characters make power plays in the bedroom (or kitchen, cars or couch) in Glatt's dark, efficient stories (after her 2004 novel, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That). The men and women drink too much, marry badly, dislike each other, get depressed and engage in joyless sex. "And I remember thinking: We are ugly and deserve each other; we deserve this. Then I helped him with my zipper," a woman reminisces about an early experience in "Waste," about her resentful surrender to her husband's demands that she pee on him. In "Soup," a widow flirts with her teenage son's delinquent friend, with dangerous results. A man suppresses his lust for his stepdaughter in "Animals." In "The Body Shop," a man makes a pass at a stripper and then his wife seduces the strip-club bouncer; in "Ludlow," Glatt depicts a doomed marriage during what should be the honeymoon stage. A husband and wife spew vitriol at each other in "Grip," then treat their young daughter no better, abandoning her as callously as some people do cats. Though Glatt's writing is often funny and insightful, she offers a relentlessly harsh take on human nature and sexual politics.
