Prodigals
Stories
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- €15.99
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- €15.99
Publisher Description
Adrift in lives of possibility and limitation, the flawed, struggling and sympathetic characters of these desperate, eerie stories seek refuge from meaninglessness and boredom in love, art, friendship, drugs, and sex. A journalist is either the guest or captive of a reclusive former tennis star at his mansion in the French hills; a terrible storm forces a man and a woman, who may be his therapist, to flee New York together; the artistic ambitions of a banker are laid bare when he comes under the influence of two strange sisters.
Unflinching, funny and profound, Prodigals maps the degradations of contemporary life - from the deification of celebrity, to the impotence of violence, to the psychological debts of privilege, to the loss of grand narratives - with unusual insight, sincerity, and passion. It is a fiercely honest and heartfelt look at what we have become, the comedy of our foibles, and our longing for home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Privileged characters confront the spiritual emptiness of contemporary life in this deeply felt and sparklingly erudite debut collection. In "Wagner in the Desert," a writer joins a cadre of young professionals "sustainability experts, P.R. lifers... that strange species of human being who has invented an app" on a drug-fueled trip to Palm Springs, Calif., only to find himself deflated by "regret that we had grown self-knowing enough to avoid our mistakes." In "Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy," a different writer comes under the spell of a tennis legend whose celebrity may or may not have made him insane. In "Metanarrative Breakdown," the star of the collection, a visit by the narrator to his dying grandfather becomes an occasion for a contemplation of narrative and language: "All the words we had for everything added up to a cataloged death sentence of the discrete," he thinks, "turning the raw matter of experience transactionable at the cost of making experience itself inaccessible." Jackson's exquisite insight and mandarin prose style call to mind David Foster Wallace and Ben Lerner, but his preoccupation with the demise of romance, wonderment, and spirituality in our hyper-knowing age seems entirely his own. "It was not so much information that lay beyond my reach," one character thinks, "as a sort of presence, of shared and consummate openness, a kind of psychic nudity."
