Orientation: A Story
And Other Stories
Publisher Description
Orientation introduces a writer at the height of his powers, whose work surely invites us to reassess the landscape of American fiction.
A new employee's first-day office tour includes descriptions of other workers' most private thoughts and actions.
"Orientation" is a story from Daniel Orozco's critically acclaimed collection of the same name, which leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night supermarket trips for cookie binges, exceptional data entry, and an exiled dictator's occasional piss on the U.S. embassy. A love affair blooms between two officers in the impartially worded pages of a police blotter; during an earthquake, the consciousness of the entire state of California shakes free for examination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Veteran short-fiction journeyman Orozco makes a long-overdue book debut with a rewarding collection infused with wonderfully wrought landscapes and telling glimpses of alienation. In the much anthologized title story, an omniscient tour guide takes a new hire around the cubicles, identifying the employee who is also a serial killer, several one-sided love interests, and the resident ghost of the office. The haunting "Hunger Tales" comprised sketches of people who gorge, splurge on supermarket cookies, or, like a 600-pound Iraq War veteran, eat themselves into obesity, revealing the power of food to heal, connect, and hurt. In "I Run Every Day," a pathological long-distance runner deals with the hectoring of his fellow workers and the come-ons of the new secretary, who gets as close as anyone ever has and pays a price for it. Orozco displays considerable descriptive ability with an obsessive attention to banal details, spinning archetypes to complicate a cross-section of American society. The writer's gifts are particularly apparent in "Somoza's Dream," the tale of a South American dictator in exile and his assassin. This collection has been a long time coming, and it's been worth the wait.
