Baby Geisha
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
"Half ingenuous and half wily, winningly hard to pin down. The result is a kind of everyday fantastic. Dalton nails the Walserian trick of evincing a sincerity nearly indistinguishable from irony. The effect is a poised instability, more uncanny than the magic the stories sometimes describe."
-Bookforum
"Dalton handles her narratives with a deft skill and a keen, distinct, confident voice that never eases up, never ceases to surprise, leaving readers happy to experience her intriguing world up close. Just the way we like it."
-Brooklyn Rail
"[The stories] feel like brilliant sexual fairy tales on drugs. Dalton writes of self-discovery and sex with a knowing humility and humor."
-Interview Magazine
"'Pura Vida,' about an emotionally unavailable journalist on assignment to cover a sloth clinic in Costa Rica, is a standout, its final moment between woman and sloth arriving with breathtaking lightness, like the first flower of spring. Other memorable outings include trips to the Missouri Ozarks ("Wet Look"), the Alps ("Shrub of Emotion"), and the Painted Desert ("Baby Geisha"), with men and women on the verge of, but never quite reaching, psycho-sexual breakthroughs."
-Los Angeles Magazine Critic's Pick
"[Baby Geisha] pokes fun, it's satirical, there's an underlying delicious irony to it, and the telling parts are the ones where Dalton coins names, cuts down trees with her paragraphs, gives us just a touch of the absurd... Dalton's skill as a writer, and above all her expertise in choosing words that play into a darker cultural picture--an offsetting of America's natural high!--are not to be missed here."
-Fanzine
Baby Geisha is a collection of thirteen sexually-charged stories that roam from the Coney Island Ferris wheel to the Greek Isles.
True to Trinie Dalton's form, the stories in Baby Geisha are distinctly imagined while also representing a more grounded approach in the author's style. There's the Joan Didion-obsessed starving journalist of "Pura Vida," struggling to maintain a relationship with her performance artist sisters (or anyone, for that matter), on assignment in Costa Rica to write an article on sloth-hugging. "Millennium Chill" is about a woman who discovers that her body heat is mysteriously linked to that of an elderly beggar.
Baby Geisha serves to support Dalton's reputation as a remarkable stylist and a very original artist.
Trinie Dalton has authored and/or edited five books. Wide Eyed (Akashic), Sweet Tomb (Madras Press), and A Unicorn Is Born (Abrams) are works of fiction. Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is (McSweeney’s) and Mythtym (Picturebox) are art compilations. She written articles for venues such as Bookforum, Paper, Purple, Arthur, The Believer, and Bomb. She teaches book/arts and writing at Pratt and NYU, and is on the MFA Fiction faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dalton (Wide Eyed) compiles whimsies of varied quality in this new collection of short prose. In the parable-like "Millennium Chill," a "mother-aged" woman who can't find warmth in her new home is visited by a beggar who has memorized her possessions and requests bits of charity: a television set, green galoshes, her cat, her hands, and the "several hundred sweaters" that "cascaded down everything." In "The Sad Drag Monologues," in which clownish photographs festoon each piece, narrator Koshare Wildcat declares, "I don't want to make characters, I want to speak directly to you.... What I care about is the message...." Aptly named narrator Too Cute concurs: "But to turn this into a real story with real characters would be to macerate the metaphor." Maybe that's why the monologues work better as creative essays, leaving the book's few traditionally crafted fictions to lasso the powers of the short story form. Though Dalton writes in the minimalist vein, alongside the likes of Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and Gary Lutz, her peculiar fascinations give her a singular voice. Not every piece pays off, but on the whole it's a pleasurable trip.