Refresh, Refresh
-
- £7.99
-
- £7.99
Publisher Description
'The stories in Refresh, Refresh are big-hearted and drunk and dangerous, and there's a heightened, unnerving vibe as you travel through Percy's world. You never know where you will end up ... but you can be sure that he'll actually take you somewhere.'
Dan Chaon
Here is the United States of today. The young men and boys in this bold, fiery collection do the unthinkable to prove to themselves - to everyone - that they are strong enough to face the heartbreak in this world. The war in Iraq empties the small town of Tumalo, Oregon of fathers, leaving their sons to fight among themselves. There is a bear on the loose, a house with a basement that opens up into a cave and a nuclear meltdown that renders the Pacific Northwest into a contemporary Wild West.
'Benjamin Percy moves instinctively toward the molten center of contemporary writing, the place where genre fiction ... overflows its boundaries and becomes something dark and grand and percipient. These stories contain a brutal power and are radiant with pain-only a writer of surpassing honesty and directness could lead us here.' Peter Straub
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Percy's second collection (following last year's The Language of Elk) traces lives led in rural Oregon's fractured, mostly poor communities. The title story (selected for The Best American Short Stories 2006), presents Josh, a young man from small-town Tumalo who watches as men who signed up as Marine reservists for "beer pay" leave to fight in the Iraq War, including Josh's father. As Josh's unreliable first person details a deer hunt, the escapades of the town recruitment officer and the less-and-less frequent e-mails from his father, tension slowly builds. Set during a blackout, "The Caves in Oregon" follows geology teacher Becca and her husband, Kevin, as they explore a network of caves beneath their home, grappling to understand each other in the wake of a miscarriage. "Meltdown" imagines a nuclear disaster in November 2009, while the menacing "Whisper" opens with the accidental late-life death of Jacob, leaving his brother, Gerald, to care for Jacob's stroke-impaired wife. Percy's talent for putting surprising characters in difficult contemporary settings makes this a memorable collection.
