Confidence
Stories
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Nominated for the 2015 Giller Prize.
Nominated for the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
Among the National Post's 50 Best Books of 2015
One of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year, 2015
Among NOW Toronto's Top 10 Books of 2015
In the stories of Confidence, there are ecstasy-taking PhD students, financial traders desperate for husbands, owners of failing sex stores, violent and unremovable tenants, aggressive raccoons, seedy massage parlors, experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day, and wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. There is one magic cinema and everyone has a secret of some kind.
Russell Smith is the author of Girl Crazy and How Insensitive. Confidence, recently longlisted for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, is his US debut.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith (How Insensitive) specializes in portraits of the thin social strata of Toronto the fashionable (trend-conscious partygoers, habitu s of hip downtown restaurants and bars), the aspiring white middle class, and dissatisfied heterosexual couples whose male halves display a relentless propensity for infidelity. With gallery openings, DJs, snorted pharmaceuticals, vapid conversations about rabbit dumplings in miso vanilla froth, and the expected handful of cheating husbands and boyfriends, this collection of eight stories reflect the author's ongoing attraction to his signature demographic. His guys might be aging (as in "Fun Girls") or climbing the real estate ladder ("Gentrification"), but they still troll faddish venues for pretty women and cool contacts. The most memorable stories work with the formula but have added depth. Mixing satiric comedy with pathos, the married dad in "Raccoons" pretends to search the garage for the titular pest. In fact he is digging for sex tapes about which a furious woman (an affair that flamed out) has been making threatening phone calls, while he strives to maintain the illusion of being nothing but a loving husband and father. A minor change in Smith's strategy, the story signals his capability of breaking away from his shopworn themes and settings.
