Aliens of Affection
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book: The idiosyncratic genius of Padgett Powell shines through in nine stories that bend the conventions of short fiction.
Padgett Powell’s literary stage is a blurred vision of the American South. His characters are bored, sad, assured, confused, deluded, and often just one step away from madness. The stories they populate are madder still, delivered by a voice enthralling and distinctive.
Whether he’s chronicling a housewife’s encouragement of adolescent lust, following two good ol’ boys on their search for a Chinese healer, or delving into the mind of an unstable moped accident survivor as he awaits a hefty settlement check, Powell revels in the irregularities of the mundane. His people occupy bar stools and strip clubs, pickup truck cabs and mental health clinics, looking for love, drugs, answers. According to the New York Times Book Review, “Mr. Powell is like a fabulous guest at a dinner party, the guy who gets people drinking far too much and licking their dessert plates and laughing at jokes—for which not a few of them will hate themselves in the morning.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shunted one way or another to the margins of the New South, the characters in these witty but often formulaic nine stories struggle for something approaching love and acceptance. As Mr. Albemarle, a character in the title story says: "Affection was that which, and the only thing on earth which, you should be eternally thankful for." In "Trick or Treat," the collection's best offering, a neglected housewife embodies this principle by seducing a 12-year-old neighborhood "Lolito." In "Scarlotti and the Sinkhole," a man injured (and possibly brain-damaged) in a highway accident yearns for a connection with the pretty clerk at his local liquor store. The connection comes, but only as he slides farther and farther from reality. The "Wayne" chronicles re-introduce, in a series of funny, surprisingly sympathetic vignettes, the redneck roofer and dreamer readers first met in Typical, Powell's first collection. Powell writes in hyperactive prose, borrowing language from commercials and employing characters who speak and think through a fog of non sequiturs and TV allusions; now and then their (gloriously rendered) trash-talk seems to interest Powell more than the people who generate it. Hip, sexy and playful throughout, only in its weakest stories does this collection sacrifice warmth for flippancy. Rights:: Janklow and Nesbit.
