Universal Love
Stories
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A wonderfully warm and inventive collection from the award-winning and Pushcart Prize-nominated author of Children of the New World.
A boy and his father find music in a drowned city. A lonely twenty-something gets addicted to comfort porn. A man is given a choice to have his trauma surgically removed. A mourning daughter brings her dead mother back to life as a hologram—but the source material isn’t quite right.
In these resonant, fantastic stories about the human thirst for connection amid rapid technological advancement, Alexander Weinstein conjures worlds like our own, but rife with the possibilities that our present timeline hasn’t led us to—yet.
Alexander Weinstein is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of Children of the New World, which was named a book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Google and Electric Literature. He is a recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, Etching's Whirling and New Millennium Prizes. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Siena Heights University and lives in Ann Arbor.
‘Weinstein is a master of his craft.’ Millions
‘In the vein of George Saunders, Rick Bass and Alex Shakar, Weinstein writes with stirring particularity, unfailing sensitivity, and supercharged imagination, creating nuanced stories harbouring a molten core of astutely satirical inquiries.’ Booklist (starred review)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in the near future, Weinstein's troubling and compassionate collection (after Children of the New World) imagines some dire ramifications of social media and robotics. In the sweetly comic "The Year of Nostalgia," a dead woman returns in the form of a hologram, complete with memories and personality traits assembled from her social media accounts and diaries. Leah, the reanimated woman's daughter, discovers a more adventurous, free-spirited version of her mother than the Midwestern housewife she remembered, since the hologram has been programmed to act on her desires for travel and romance. The portentous "Beijing," set in a future version of the city so polluted that it's only possible to navigate by stopping at stations that dispense breathable air, follows a gay American expatriate whose lover has become addicted to having his memories removed through microsurgeries, leaving the men's relationship suspended in the present. In the chilling "Childhood," the robot "son" of a suburban couple observes his older robot sister becoming addicted to illicitly smoking her "emotion card" through a glass pipe. Though some of the stories lean on intriguing concepts without developing complete narratives, the collection convincingly explores many potential effects of social engineering. Channeling Ray Bradbury with contemporary allegories, Weinstein will make readers think twice about their relationship to technology.
