Good and Evil and Other Stories (Unabridged)
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A haunting, unforgettable collection of tales by Samanta Schweblin, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature and three-time Booker Prize finalist
"The stories of “Good and Evil” are powerfully evocative and unsettling. They seem to hover, indeed like fever dreams, between the reassuring familiarities of domestic life and the stark, unpredictable, visionary flights of the unconscious.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review
“The most brilliant writer of short stories writing today, she now delivers her most haunting, fierce and provocative book.”—Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive
"Schweblin creates characters whose lifelines reach some of the most extraordinary questions ever articulated in our literature." —Karen Russell, author of The Antidote and Swamplandia!
“Remarkably taut, clear, precise, and yet capable of capturing the extent of our human messiness, these stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin
The characters of Good and Evil find themselves at a point of no return, dazzled by the glare of impending tragedy. Vulnerable and profoundly human, they become trapped in the instant in which the uncanny has lurched into their lives. Some are transformed, some are isolated, others waver between guilt or tenderness. All of them are driven by uncertainty.
Schweblin’s prose uses tension and truth to construct a literary universe in which the monsters of everyday life come so close to us that we can almost feel their breath. Her writing provokes awe and disquiet, a state of alarm that at the same time transports us to a hypnotic world as recognizable as it is strange.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We couldn’t stop listening to Samanta Schweblin’s collection of short stories exploring the dark, eerie, and uncanny aspects of everyday life. Though there are wisps of the macabre woven throughout, there are no zombies or demons in these tales—the real horror here is psychological. A feeling of suffocating dread pervades each story, as if things could go catastrophically wrong for Schweblin’s deeply lonely characters at any moment (and sometimes do). The situations may sound conventional at first, from a pair of friends who fixate on a past tragedy to a dementia patient whose daughter remembers their strained relationship all too well, but the way Schweblin steers her narratives ever so subtly into the terrifying, the haunting, and even the inexplicable is absolutely captivating. Good and Evil and Other Stories is a fitting title for a collection about the chillingly gray areas of mundane life.
