Nice Big American Baby
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
‘Unforgettable and utterly affecting. You can’t turn the pages fast enough’ Dave Eggers
Judy Budnitz, author of the Orange Prize shortlisted novel If I Told You Once and the critically acclaimed collection Flying Leap. creates her own brand of stark, dystopian reality in this impressive collection of blisteringly inventive and surreal new stories. Budnitz's first-person narrators are pitch perfect, helping the reader to see from their perspective, no matter how odd it might be. Clever, comic and perpetually surprising, these are stories that demand to be read again and again.
‘A truly talented young writer.’ Times
Reviews
Praise for Nice Big American Baby:
‘An impressive talent harnessed to a wild imagination’ The Times
Praise for Flying Leap:
‘Truly impeccable and gripping pieces of prose … There is not a story here that does not contain an unusual or striking image.’ The Times
‘Judy Budnitz’s collection of extraordinarily eccentric short stories makes the heart soar’ Elle
‘With a range as daring and pleasingly precocious as the title, Budnitz’s stories flirt with fairy tale, absurdism, comedy and science fiction … A series of hearteningly ambitious leaps of imagination: like fairy tales, the best of these stories have an immediacy which will endure.’ Guardian
Praise for If I Told You Once:
'A truly remarkable book by a truly talented young writer … somewhere between Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves and the most captivating fairy tales and folklore of old.' The Times
'A powerful, evocative tale, shot through with a winning black humour and prose of simplicity and strength. It challenges its own assertion that ‘there are some stories that defy telling’.' Observer
'Stunningly evocative. Budnitz astutely explores the fantasies that are spun in the individual mind about who we are and what we are, and how sometimes these illusions are as necessary to our existence as the air we breathe.' Time Out
About the author
Judy Budnitz was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Atlanta. She graduated from Harvard in 1995, was writing fellow at the Fine Arts Center, Provincetown, taught at Brown and Harvard Universities, and now teaches at Columbia University in Manhattan.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Budnitz (Flying Leap; If I Told You Once) creates her own hybrid brand of stark, dystopian reality in this impressive collection, working an odd jumble of fantastical, historical and contemporary detail into stories that comment obliquely on the current state of human affairs. In "Where We Come From," a pregnant woman desperate to have her baby in America goes to great lengths to cross the border, waiting for years to give birth until her son "fills her completely, his arms fill her arms, his legs fill her legs." In "The Kindest Cut," the narrator discovers an old journal written by a surgeon during a war: blue and gray uniforms and a doctor's surgical techniques suggest the American Civil War, but the story takes a fantastical twist as the surgeon become obsessed with severed limbs. In the disturbing and seemingly futuristic world of "Sales," door-to-door salesmen are rounded up and kept in an unlocked pen from which they choose not to escape. Funny and sad at once, it's a kind of twisted love story in which a young woman's attempts to help are rejected: "The salesmen don't know that I am trying to help them, they yell at me that I'm ruining business, standing in the way of normal commerce. The customer is always right! they scream." Budnitz's first-person narrators are pitch perfect, helping the reader to see from their perspectives, no matter how odd it might be. These bizarre and masterfully crafted stories will thrill readers of literary fiction who hunger for an innovative American voice.
