Anatomies
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this daring debut collection, Susan McCarty steers lives according to their bodies. Two young men compare and challenge their physical limitations in the months following respective heart transplants. A woman returns to Iowa from New York and binges on the food and relationships she thought she’d left behind. A gigolo discovers he can no longer have traditional sex, a survivor of the zombie apocalypse gives up food, and a test prep tutor is forced to admit the life of the mind can’t compete with the mysteries between two bodies. In language both captivating and honest, McCarty reveals the ways we use our bodies to confront our hidden selves. Draw from her well of good-intentioned limbs and charming collapses, and you’ll surface in territory clear and familiar as a mirror.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title of McCarty's debut short fiction collection is concerned less with biological phenomena than with what makes her characters tick emotionally. In "Fellowship," a young girl whose parents have announced their impending separation begins measuring experiences in her life in terms of loss and leaving. "Another Zombie Story" projects a darkly funny future in which people rediscover sexual relations, having foregone them for Internet porn in the years before the zombie apocalypse. "Indirect Object" culminates in an awkwardly intimate moment between the father of a young boy who committed suicide and the teacher with whom the boy was romantically infatuated. McCarty's characters often show poor judgment and make bad decisions, but her affection and sympathy for them is never in doubt. Her teen protagonist in "Shearing Day" makes a painfully tragic mistake, in apparent overcompensation for the physical frailty he experienced before his heart transplant. In "The Fat of the Land," a woman who returns home to Iowa after years in Manhattan accepts her fattening and infantilization by a succession of boyfriends as the inevitable consequence of putting her carefree past behind her and growing up. McCarty's deft blend of drama and humor always rings true; there's not an out-of-place moment in this resonant collection.
