Among the Missing
Stories
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A sharp and haunting collection of twelve stories about people who live far outside the American Dream, while wondering which decision, which path, or which accident brought them to this place.
“Unforgettable . . . hums with life and wry humor . . . The stories sneak resolutely up on you, like new weather that hits before you know it.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
Each story in Among the Missing radiates with sharp humor, mystery, wonder, and startling compassion as Dan Chaon imagines today’s family instinctively trying to stay together, only to find itself lost in the throes of a chaotic, modern world.
In “Safety Man,” a young widow and her children become increasingly attached to an inflatable protector-doll, as the world outside seems to grow ever more threatening; “Big Me” follows a lonely, imaginative twelve-year-old boy who believes an older (slightly creepier) version of himself has moved in next door; In “I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me,” a man blinded by love for his imprisoned brother ignores the warnings of his distant wife and a talking parrot who both witness things he’s never seen; and “Among the Missing” explores how the death of a family, found buckled in their car at the bottom of a lake, casts a shadow on a small town and intrudes upon the narrator's relationship with his aging mother.
A writer of enormous talent and emotional depth, Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling effect. Among the Missing lingers in the mind through its subtle grace and power of language.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the 12 quietly accomplished stories of his second collection, Chaon explores the complicated geography of human relationships, from the unintentional failures and minute betrayals of daily existence to the numbing grief caused by abandonment, disappearance or death. Specific and disquieting absences an uncle who killed himself, a mother who vanished, a friend who was kidnapped haunt the protagonists, and a series of metaphoric and literal stand-ins take the place of what's missing. In "Safety Man," a dummy intended for crime deterrence propped in the passenger seat, it looks like a male companion becomes a kind of surrogate husband for a young widow, and for her daughters, an inflatable father; in "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me," a woman caring for her incarcerated brother-in-law's macaw comes to loathe the bird, its ugly talk transforming it into a symbol of everything wrong and incomprehensible about him. By and large, Chaon's characters are citizens of the emotional hinterlands, lonely even when surrounded: "How did people go about falling in love, getting married, having families, living their lives?" Even those who think they know the answers recognize their powerlessness, such as the father who, looking into his son's eyes, thinks, "I am aware that hatred is a definite possibility at the end of the long tunnel of parenthood, and I suspect that there is little one can do about it." And yet these stories are neither morbid nor even particularly melancholic. Singularly dedicated to an examination of all the profundity and strangeness of the quotidian, they are, in their best moments, unsettling, moving, even beautiful.
