A Blind Corner
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3.0 • 1개의 평가
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- US$13.99
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From the award-winning author of Mrs. and The Fundamentals of Play comes a brilliant and biting short story collection about pride, privilege, and our nagging need to belong.
In an era of “hot takes” and easy generalizations, this collection reclaims the absurdities and paradoxes of life as it is actually lived from the American fantasy of “niceness”. In Macy’s world, human desires and fatal blind spots slam headlong into convenient, social-media-driven narratives that would sort us into neat boxes of insider or outsider; good or bad; with us or against us.
Time and again, whether at home or in the age-old role of Americans abroad, Macy’s women see their good intentions turn awry. A woman who tries to do a good deed for an underprivileged child sees it go horribly wrong. A wife, attempting to be a good host to a friend’s strange ex-boyfriend, finds herself in a compromised situation. And, in the title story, a newlywed fancies herself a Euro-sophisticate until an accident reminds her just how truly foreign she really is.
In tales where shocking and sometimes brutal events disabuse characters of their most cherished beliefs, Macy forgoes easy moralization in favor of uncomfortable truths that reveal the complexity of what it means to be human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Macy (Mrs.) returns with a discomfiting collection featuring characters who take risks and face disappointments. In "Nude House," timid Massachusetts teenager Susanna Gutteridge starts up a sexual relationship with a boy who subsequently becomes institutionalized and is assumed by the townspeople to have schizophrenia. In "Residents Only," a woman named Alex brings her daughters to a friend's beach house in Acapulco, only to discover the host can't make it. What follows is a complicated situation involving access to the pool and interactions with a cleaner, culminating in a devastating accident. In the title story, married American couple Tim and Alison travel to Italy, where Tim must leave halfway through. Alone, Alison drives drunkenly, does a terrible thing, and blames it on the owner of the house where she's staying: "You've ruined this country for me, Luigi!" Often, characters display a propensity for self-righteousness, as with a mother in "We Don't Believe in That Crap" who rails against junk food and television. Throughout, Macy impresses with strange internal monologues. Here's Alex again: "That truculent type of fear gripped me, such as you feel when a plane is boarding, and for now, you have the adjoining seat to yourself." Macy succeeds at dragging the reader, along with her characters, out of their comfort zone.
