Entropic
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2016 Thomas Raddall
Atlantic Fiction Award at the East Coast Literary Awards!
Shortlisted
for the Book Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing
Awards!
Shortlisted for the 2015 New Brunswick Book Awards!
In
this collection of stories, author and filmmaker R. W. Gray (Crisp) finds
the place where the beautiful, the strange, and the surreal all meet—sometimes
meshing harmoniously, sometimes colliding with terrible violence, launching his
characters into a redefined reality.
A lovestruck man
discovers the secret editing room where his girlfriend erases all her flaws; a
massage artist finds that she has a gift, but is uncertain of the price; a
beautiful man sets out to be done with beauty; and a gay couple meets what
appear to be younger versions of themselves, learning that history can indeed
repeat itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gray's second collection (after 2010's Crisp) contains 10 stories, with only three having seen previous publication, and treads a fascinating line between realities, coming close to but never quite dipping its toes fully into surrealism. In "Blink," a man discovers his wife's editing suite, hidden in their apartment, with which she erases her flaws. "Beautifully Useless" follows a young man as he uncovers more of the mystery and vulnerability of his estranged father by watching a pornographic film he'd starred in some years prior. In "Mirrorball," two men, a former couple, encounter their doppelgangers, and begin relationships with their younger simulacrums. The powerful title story is an unsettling study of art, objectification, consent, ownership, and saying goodbye, as one man places his body under the care of another, to be put to sleep every night while a rotating queue of friends and family spend up to 40 minutes doing almost whatever they want to him and with him without consequence. Only "Sinai," the longest and most ethereal of the stories, feels strangely out of place in what otherwise is a tender, globetrotting, strongly visual collection.
