Fox Tooth Heart
Stories
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Bold and ingenious” stories about the dark heart of America by the acclaimed Whiting Award–winning author (The New York Times Book Review).
“Feverish, psychotropic, bold, mesmerizing, painful, Fox Tooth Heart is full of stories about people living on the margins of society, characters born into dark circumstances, or . . . driven there by their own obsessions and addictions” (Huffington Post)—murderers, loners, addicts, neurotics and outcasts stumbling side-by-side with “the down-and-out heroes of George Saunders or John Updike, captured just before their fall” (Vice.com).
In this “achingly visceral . . . masterpiece” McManus ventures from trailers hidden in deep Southern woods to an Arkansas ranch converted into an elephant refuge to a Georgia tent community of sex offenders to a Kentucky band of teenage Satanists. His lost-soul men, women, and children reel precariously between common anxiety and drug-enhanced paranoia, sober reality and fearsome hallucination (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
“Powered by radiant prose” (Vanity Fair), these nine “eccentric . . . wildly inventive” (Publishers Weekly) stories of twisted humor and pathos re-establish McManus as one of the most bracing voices of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McManus (Bitter Milk) invites readers on an eccentric journey through Southern, Southwestern, and Middle America in this collection of wildly inventive short stories. Though they're set in America, they exist in a meticulously crafted world, quite different than our own: a world in which rock stars communicate with elephants ("Elephant Sanctuary") and clones of ex-presidents convene ("Gateway to the Ozarks"). In "Cult Heroes," a teenage mountain biker seeking to emancipate himself from his parents attempts to bike the Grand Canyon. In "The Ninety-Fifth Percentile," a Porche takes center stage in a young boy's coming of age in Houston. Yet the stories are most memorable not when they contain outlandish plots but when McManus delves into the minds of his characters, allowing readers to experience their anxieties, delusions, fantasies, and fears. Though the stories can blend together, McManus's prose is clear, a winning contrast to his askew narratives.
