Cries for Help, Various
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR and Vanity Fair
"Rifles through fear, identity, meaning, and cultural memory in forty–four short, surreal stories." —Vanity Fair
"By turns moving, funny, and maddening…. very much in the key of Donald Barthelme." —The New York Times Book Review
"Somehow both grounded and absurd, each one of the stories trying get at that heart of the confusion and sadness at the core of contemporary life." —VICE
From the highly acclaimed author of Edisto and The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell's new collection of stories, Cries for Help, Various, follows his mentor Donald Barthelme's advice that "wacky mode" must "break their hearts." The surrealistic and comical terrain of most of the forty–four stories here is grounded by a real preoccupation with longing, fear, work, loneliness, and cultural nostalgia. These universal concerns are given exhilarating life by way of Powell's "wit, his . . . dazzling turns of phrase" (Scott Spencer).
Padgett Powell's language is both lofty and low–down, his tone cranky and heartfelt, exuberant and inconsolable. His characters rebel against convention and ambition, hoping to maintain their very sanity by doing so. Even the most hilarious or fantastical stories in Cries for Help, Various ring gloriously, poignantly, true.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Powell (Edisto) has occasionally been pigeonholed as a sort of Southern Donald Barthelme, and it is true that most of the 44 stories collected here can be described as short comic tales with a distinct Dixie swagger. But these stories offer even more, such as the emotional vigor of "Spy," in which an aging father comes to suspect that his daughter is working for the CIA ("My daughter wears a wire, I a diaper") or the pathos of "A Local Boy," in which a rock-bottom loser blames his shortcomings on Sherman's March. Other stories imagine a grade school friendship between Charles Dickens and Janis Joplin ("Joplin and Dickens") and take the point of view of a recluse considering investing in a Ukrainian mail-order bride ("The Retarded Hermit"); several ("Wagons, Ho!" and "The New World") meditate on the settling of America. There's also a pair of companion pieces to Powell's The Interrogative Mood ("The Imperative Mood" and "The Indicative Mood") and a strange trilogy about Boris Yeltsin. But the best of these stories and they're all good plumb for depth and coax profundity out of the moody detritus of Americana. Powell's range is matched only by his sense of play, and this book is a skeleton key to an extremely gifted and quintessentially American writer, at home in any form.
