Ecstatic Cahoots
Fifty Short Stories
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this remarkable collection of bite-size stories, Stuart Dybek, one of our most prodigious writers, explores the human appetite for rapture and for trust. With fervent intensity and sly wit, he gives each tale his signature mix of characters—some almost ghostly, others vividly real—who live in worlds tinged with surreal potential. There are crazed nuns hijacking streetcars, eerie adventures across frozen ponds, and a boy who is visited by a miniature bride and groom every night in his uncle's doomsday compound. Whether they are about a simple transaction, a brave inquiry, a difficult negotiation, or shared bliss, the stories in Ecstatic Cahoots target the friction between our need for ecstatic self-transcendence and our passionate longing for trust between lovers, friends, family, and even strangers.
Call it micro-fiction or mini-fiction, flash fiction or short shorts. Whatever the label, the marvelous encounters here are marked by puzzlement, anguish, and conspiratorial high spirits. In this thrilling collection, Stuart Dybek has once again re-envisioned the possibilities of fiction, creating myriad human situations that fold endlessly upon each other, his crackling prose drawing out the strange, the intimate, and the mysterious elements in each.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A roller coaster of realist and fantastical scenes, slice-of-life character sketches, and page-long fables, Dybek's collection of flash fiction jostles from story to story like a streamlined zephyr. Much of the book feels like snippets of conversation, or fights overheard through an apartment wall. The daughter with her mother's bellowing voice who sings only in dreams; the bumbling supervisor lured into paying for a night with his employee; the woman who wants to shave her boyfriend: " Sounds nice,' he said, rather than tell her there was no way in hell she was getting near him with a razor." Dybek switches easily from humor to sadness, from the sensual to the surreal. A young man must leave his girlfriend to find his way home through a blizzard in "C rdoba." In "Ant," a lovely day for two lovers is pulled apart by an ant that manages to cart the man away after he remembers a story read to him in childhood by his uncle. In "A Confluence of Doors," a castaway on the ocean comes upon a veritable island of locked, knocking doors. In "Ice," a couple brave out onto a frozen pond, the location of a past wedding party where the bride and groom drowned, their ghostly figures still visible under the sheet of ice. Dybek uses all his creative muscle in these brief stories, which are both elusive and precise.
