Good Trouble
Stories
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A masterly collection of eleven stories about the way we live now from the best-selling author of Netherland.
From bourgeois facial-hair trends to parental sleep deprivation, Joseph O’Neill closely observes the mores of his characters, whose vacillations and second thoughts expose the mysterious pettiness, underlying violence, and, sometimes, surprising beauty of ordinary life in the early twenty-first century. A lonely wedding guest talks to a goose; two poets struggle over whether to participate in a “pardon Edward Snowden” verse petition; a cowardly husband lets his wife face a possible intruder in their home; a potential co-op renter in New York City can’t find anyone to give him a character reference.
On the surface, these men and women may be in only mild trouble, but in these perfectly made, fiercely modern stories O’Neill reminds us of the real, secretly political consequences of our internal monologues. No writer is more incisive about the strange world we live in now; the laugh-out-loud vulnerability of his people is also fodder for tears.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first story collection, O'Neill (The Dog; Netherland) tackles the politics of friendship, facial hair, petitions, and spousal duties, with solid results. In "The Sinking of the Houston," a father uses GPS tracking to hunt down his son's stolen cell phone, only to be distracted in his pursuits by an elderly neighbor's stories of the Bay of Pigs invasion. "Goose" sees a man hopscotch across Italy before attending his college friend's second wedding. In "The Death of Billy Joel," a quartet of golfing buddies head to Florida for a weekend of celebration, only to ultimately question the value of travel and escapism. O'Neill's narratives frequently wander between ideas and end without definitive resolution. When this works, as in "The Mustache in 2010" a tale of shaving, social history, and mindfulness the reader is delightfully tossed about. Yet other stories, such as "The Trusted Traveler," concerning a former student who visits his professor's home once a year, never quite achieve deep resonance and sputter in their final acts. O'Neill's writing is always inventive, and despite occasional missteps, the collection will please fans of quirky short fiction.
