The Path of Most Resistance
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A humorous and vivid collection of stories about the struggle for human connection by two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize nominee Russell Wangersky.
As entertaining as they are insightful, the stories in The Path of Most Resistance are anchored by the concept of passive aggression in our everyday lives: ordinary people who are quietly, desperately, and indirectly trying to impose their will on the uncaring world around them. From a woman who compulsively shops for luggage in order to sublimate her desire for a divorce to a senior citizen who tries to force his family to visit by refusing to eat, the characters in this collection try to change their lives through oblique resistance.
The Path of Most Resistance is an observant and compassionate look at the feelings of powerlessness that we all share, and will have readers silently cringing and nodding in recognition of their own bad behaviour.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Microcosm and macrocosm are laid bare in this collection of 12 rigorous stories by Wangersky (Walt), whose fiction has won an Independent Publisher Book Award and many other accolades. Wangersky delves deep into life's minutiae and emerges with snapshots of the cosmos, whether he's reflecting on traffic and urban sprawl through the eyes of a traveling salesman in "Rage" or depicting the hyper competitive snow-blowing regime of two elderly neighbors in "Snow." A gay woman's letter to her now-straight ex details the particulars of a Mexican town in "The Path of Most Resistance," a five-year-old explores a family campground alone at dawn in "Bide Awhile," and a man slips in and out of memories of his wife's departure while orchestrating the painstaking move of an 80-ton machinery module in "Heavy Load." For all the specifics, Wangersky still leaves room for the unknown, and his endings happen almost mid-step. In a few of the stories, this makes for a strange sense of detachment and uncertainty as to the stakes at hand, but in the majority, the endings hang suspended, almost magically, in the air and continue to do so in readers' minds long after they have put the book down and gotten on with the minutiae of their own lives.
