Out There
Stories
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- CHF 7.50
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- CHF 7.50
Beschreibung des Verlags
A thrilling new voice in fiction injects the absurd into the everyday to present a startling vision of modern life, “[as] if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror” (Chang-Rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad).
“Stories so sharp and ingenious you may cut yourself on them while reading.”—Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble
FINALIST FOR THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews
With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk’s debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth’s remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by “blots,” preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection.
Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Folk debuts with a wonderful absurdist collection that explores the vagaries of human connections. In the title story, the narrator can't tell if her new boyfriend is an especially refined "blot," one of the legions of catfishing androids who recently invaded internet dating, or just a tech bro who's emotionally stunted. Shorter stories act as well-timed interludes, such as "The House's Beating Heart," in which a house has a beating heart in a closet, a brain in the roof, and a stomach in the basement. Folk soars in "A Scale Model of Gull Point," in which a tourist island's inhabitants—oppressed in ways simultaneously bonkers and viciously realistic—enact a reign of terror, and the crisis prompts a burst of maturity for the narrator, an art teacher whose sculpture career never took off after her MFA. "Big Sur," another highlight, follows the life of a blot who bunks in an SRO and attempts to get a girlfriend with messages like, "I love dogs... I would never hurt one deliberately." The story risks a sentimentality anathema to the previous stories' cynicism, and pulls it off with aplomb. The whole perfectly balances compassion and caustics, and the author has an easy hand blending everyday terror with the humor that helps people swallow it. Folk impresses with her imagination as well as her insights.
