Large Animals
Stories
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- € 11,99
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- € 11,99
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A Buzzfeed Best Fiction Book of 2017 • An Entropy magazine Best Book of 2017
“Jess Arndt’s Large Animals is wildly original, even as it joins in with the classics of loaded, outlaw literature. Acerbic, ecstatic, hilarious, psychedelic, and affecting in turn, this is an electric debut.” —Maggie Nelson, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of The Argonauts
Jess Arndt's striking debut collection confronts what it means to have a body. Boldly straddling the line between the imagined and the real, the masculine and the feminine, the knowable and the impossible, these twelve stories are an exhilarating and profoundly original expression of voice. In “Jeff,” Lily Tomlin confuses Jess for Jeff, instigating a dark and hilarious identity crisis. In “Together,” a couple battles a mysterious STD that slowly undoes their relationship, while outside a ferocious weed colonizes their urban garden. And in “Contrails,” a character on the precipice of a seismic change goes on a tour of past lovers, confronting their own reluctance to move on.
Arndt’s subjects are canny observers even while they remain dangerously blind to their own truest impulses. Often unnamed, these narrators challenge the limits of language—collectively, their voices create a transgressive new formal space that makes room for the queer, the nonconforming, the undefined. And yet, while they crave connection, love, and understanding, they are constantly at risk of destroying themselves. Large Animals pitches toward the heart, pushing at all our most tender parts—our sex organs, our geography, our words, and the tendons and nerves of our culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arndt's short stories are delicious flights of fancy, or obsession, or fertile curiosity or, more accurately, some beguiling combination of all three. All 12 pieces in her debut collection are written in the first person. It could arguably be the same narrator in each, perhaps the author herself or not. Often the stories seem to end abruptly, albeit usually meaningfully. "La Gueule de Bois" riffs on a trip to Paris, "the city whose sole monument is a comically upturned syringe." "Jeff" features a brief encounter with Lily Tomlin. "Can You Live with It" juxtaposes musings on Raskolnikov and Crime and Punishment with a kind of pub crawl through various colorful bars. "Moon Colonies" explores tacky, yet strangely beautiful Atlantic City: "In the morning the waves glowed like uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor." In "Third Arm," which is full of puckish phrases "the gag of cars," "a pudgy dark had descended" the narrator feels herself at odds with her rebellious body. And in "Together," the longest and most plot-driven story, a couple contracts a mysterious malady that slowly breaks them apart. This is a playful and provocative collection, full of sly, deft turns of phrase and striking imagery.