Why Visit America
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Welcome, dear visitor, to a proud and storied nation. When you put down this guidebook, look around you. A nation isn't land. A nation is people.
Equal parts speculative and satirical, the stories in Matthew Baker's collection portray a world within touching distance of our own. This is an America riven by dilemmas confronting so many of us, turned on its head by one of the most innovative voices of the moment.
Read together, these parallel-universe stories create a composite portrait of our true nature and a dark reflection of the world we live in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Baker's sophomore collection (after Hybrid Creatures), the mundane details of everyday life are tweaked in subtle but surprising, fantastical ways. "Rites" follows a Minnesota family's frustration with their ornery Uncle Orson, who refuses to perform his "last rites," which are expected of all people over the age of 70 and are essentially a suicide ceremony. In "Life Sentence," a felon is sent home for "reintroduction" after a procedure that permanently erased his memory of everything but his family's faces, his punishment for a terrible, unknown crime. And in the title story, a libertarian town in Texas votes to secede from the United States in protest against government corruption, renaming itself America. America's first town hall is surprisingly progressive, passing such reforms as the abolition of gendered titles and conversion to the metric system. With such a voluminous collection, there will inevitably be writerly flourishes that begin to grate, like Baker's reliance on the first person plural or his love of a list, but there are plenty of strong stories, the best of which are rooted in specific political or cultural critiques. Despite its flaws, this is a smart, imaginative, and thoughtful collection.
