Flying Leap
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The Brothers Grimm take lessons in fiction from Angela Carter to produce this uncanny and surreal work.
Judy Budnitz might just be the most exciting and unusual literary figure to emerge from the US literary thicket in 2000. She marries great technical skill to quirky humour and dizzying metaphor. She has an uncanny knack for the destabilizing and indelible image, but does not abandon sense for sensibility. She is always readable, albeit strangely so. She might yet be an Americanized heir to the throne left vacant by Angela Carter.
This collection of stories is strikingly surreal and hugely entertaining. It will appeal to fans of everyone from Tibor Fischer via Lorrie Moore to Nicholson Baker, or put another way, from Heathers to Edward Scissorhands via Annie Hall.
Among the storylines: a young man is persuaded to donate his heart to his dying mother; a girl comes of age in strange suburbia, her only friend a man dressed in a dogsuit; a man and a woman conduct a passionate love affair on a park bench.
Reviews
‘I don’t know what planet Budnitz comes from, but I’m happy to have her. Flying Leap is a tremendous debut –funny, dark, weird, adventurous, slanted and enchanted.’
Newsweek
‘Amazingly original… These unsettling short stories leave you wanting more.’
Seventeen
‘Budnitz’s humorous and original story ideas and the bold strokes with which she delineates them are the indispensable allies of her lyric intelligence… . An intriguing and mature debut.’
Rachel Cusk, The Village Voice
About the author
judy budnitz was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Atlanta. She graduated from Harvard in 1995, was writing fellow at the Fine Arts Center, Provincetown, and now teaches at Brown University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Budnitz dances with the macabre in this daring collection of 23 short stories, each a miniature universe with its own quirky rules, comic and disquieting. At her best, Budnitz, a cartoonist for the Village Voice, brings to absurd situations a clarity reminiscent of the Philip Roth who wrote Our Gang and The Breast. In the savagely funny "Guilt," for instance, a young man caves in to the expectations of his lover, his aunts and his mother's doctors, all of whom want him to donate his heart to his ailing mother; after all, in the end, death may be preferable to hearing reminders such as "She carried you for nine months. More than nine months. You were late. Do you remember?" Budnitz is also adept at child's-eye-views of the arbitrary, adult world. In "Hundred-Pound Baby," Nick's dad moves out, yet reassures him that everything will be okay. Nick thinks: "That's what Newt's dad told him last year. Now his mother works at the Quiki-Mart and dates an old man with white hair and an accent and a glass eye." Like most first collections, this one could have sustained a final pruning: a few tacked on endings and extended one-liners fail to live up to the rest. Nevertheless, Budnitz's microcosms demand a visit. Author tour.