You Have the Wrong Man
Stories
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- $4.900
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- $4.900
Descripción editorial
Maria Flook’s novels have garnered the higher praise from writers and critics alike. The New York Times called her first novel “jolting,” her writing “ethereal, spare, and erotic.” Novelist E. Annie Proulx placed her “in the front ranks of new American writers.”
You Have the Wrong Man is a powerful new work by this gifted writer. Flook’s stories enter the new sanctuaries where men and women connect, and in these eight unveiled liaisons sexual desire is presented in its deepest reaches and it full human scale. In “Rhode Island Fish Company” a woman’s maternal instincts run amok and kindle a startling betrayal; in “Prince of Motown” a household enters a crazed bereavement when Marvin Gaye is murdered; in “Lane” a man volunteers a point-by-point confession of threatening, bitter lust. These are only a few of the edgy coercions that illuminate the moral tests and erotic pressures that tear up couples and unhinge families.
In writing that is both psychologically precise and funny, relationships are worn down by carnal debts, hardships, and cold-blooded consummations, but these characters find reprieve as Flook evokes their purist motives—not just to survive, but to survive for one another.
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In her first collection of short stories, Flook (Open Water) draws an imaginative gallery of eccentrics placed in left-of-center situations. Yet even in a story such as "The Golden Therapist," in which an office romance blooms after a woman discovers that a co-worker practices auto-erotic asphyxiation, the author emphasizes the humanity of her characters, never letting their plights turn cartoonish. In "Prince of Motown," she traces the trials faced by a teenage mother when she and her baby are forced into a women's shelter after her husband retreats into heroin addiction. "Exchange Street" concerns the relationship between a transsexual and her boyfriend, who wants the two of them to team-manage a strip club. While Flook's restraint in dealing with outrageous material may be admirable, it sometimes leads to ponderous or placid storytelling; compassion doesn't preclude comedy, and at least some of the eight tales here would have benefited from the sort of comic highlights and crescendos that seem natural to such extravagant goings-on.
