All the Anxious Girls on Earth
Stories
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
All the Anxious Girls on Earth marks the debut of a startingly original literary voice. Zsuzsi Gartner's exuberant prose gives voice to unforgettable characters who survive by their wits as they cope with indifferent relationships, lackluster jobs, and the myriad curve-balls life throws their way.
A woman calls in fake bomb threats from the nineteenth floor of a bank tower as revenge against her ex-lover. The mother of a girl killed by a teenage urban guerilla thrives spectacularly in her industrious grief, transforming herself into a forgiveness guru and talk-show host. Lured into the wilderness by her desire for a man who rebuilds vintage airplanes, a young woman finds she lusts more for biscotti and city sidewalks. A small, heroic child makes a guileless request for pajamas and creates a psychic storm at the center of her anxious, achievement-mad parents' lives.
Rendered in a jittery, jazzed-up prose that has been compared to that of Lorrie Moore and Mary Flanagan, these stories brilliantly capture the pathos, beauty, and alienation of contemporary life and signal the arrival of a writer to watch.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The nine edgy tales gathered in Canadian short story stylist Gartner's debut collection are daringly diverse in presentation, if uneven in execution. Most problematic is the overuse of a tricky second-person narrative voice, employed in no fewer than three tales, including the opening story, "How to Survive in the Bush." Here, the earnestly didactic imperative detracts from the archly humorous underpinnings of a Canadian version of Green Acres involving a city girl and a reclusive aviator. Thankfully, style and content are more happily wedded in the earthy "boys growing," in which a scent-obsessed schoolteacher pursues her still sweet-smelling male students, rejecting men her own age who reek of "wet metal." In the hilarious "The Nature of Pure Evil," the protagonist discovers a novel way to assert herself. After her live-in boyfriend of seven years makes her iron his tuxedo shirt before he heads off to what turns out to be his wedding to another woman, Hedy begins calling in fake bomb threats. Gartner proves herself capable of pyrotechnic bursts of prose in "City of my dreams," which revolves around a woman named Lewis, the programmer for a film festival who retreats to work in a shop that sells food-inspired soap after a disappointed filmmaker self-immolates on her front porch. Finally, in the most ambitious piece, "Odds that, all things considered, she'd someday be happy," a terrorist act gets the four-sided Rashomon treatment, with the victim's mother benefiting the most when she uses her daughter's tragic death as the perfect springboard to a career as a talk-show host. When Gartner doesn't strain too hard at her craft, her undeniably original voice charges her stories with irresistible verve.
