Good People
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
“Lopez has the ability to give the reader whiplash with his unconventional and bewitching stories.” —Los Angeles Times
“Robert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all his—enchanting, surprising, at times devastating.” —JESS WALTER, author of Beautiful Ruins
“Robert Lopez’s strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and it’s as if a third eye has been opened.” —DAN CHAON, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we add: nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez’s unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life’s unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway.
Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez’s stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity.
Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and the story collection Asunder. He lives in Brooklyn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Personalities ranging from the amusingly neurotic to the borderline psychotic shape the 20 quirky stories in this collection. The tales are mostly narrated in the first person, and each is a rambling monologue whose speaker brings personal memories, idiosyncratic insights, and freely associated observations to bear on events. "Family of Man on Isle of Wight" is a seven-page run-on sentence whose narrator struggles with his own lack of focus to connect with a listener. In "Goodnight Maybe Forever," a man planning to commit suicide wallows in memories of his dysfunctional relationship with his mother and the habitual beatings he endured by virtually everyone he's ever known. "A Regular Day for Real People" is narrated over the course of a tennis match by a player who confesses to his opponent that he has kidnapped her brother in order to extort sexual favors from her. Although the characters in these stories are off-putting, they draw the reader into their slough of self-absorption through their bizarre behavior and occasional outrageous remarks: for example, how is it possible not to read a story all the way through if it begins, "There's more than one reason I tied you to that bedpost"? Lopez (Asunder) shows uncommon skill at evoking both laughs and shudders, sometimes in the same story.
