Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events
Stories
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling new story collection from brilliant, young, award-winning writer Kevin Moffett, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events illuminates the intimate experiences of characters caught between aspiration and achievement, uncertainty and illumination, inertia and discovery, the past and the future. Channeling unexpected, eclectic voices in a collection perfectly suited to readers of Daniyal Mueenuddin, Alice Sebold, and Dave Eggers, Moffett delivers a nuanced, powerful, humorous, and moving meditation on the trials of transitions and liminal living in today’s modern world. Richard Russo says, “the first thing you notice reading the stories in Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events is the author’s extraordinary range—of expertise, technique, imagination and wit. There doesn’t seem to be much Kevin Moffett can’t do.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moffett's prize-winning (the Nelson Algren, the Pushcart, the 2010 National Magazine Award for this collection's title story) short stories have been extensively and prestigiously published, and it's easy to see why: Moffett's work is melancholy and funny at the same time, with an uncanny knack for giving weighty topics (death especially, either imminent, remembered, or inevitable) a weightlessness that manages to make them graver rather than lighter. The best pieces, like the title story, about fathers and sons both biological and symbolic, touch on writing and memory and death. "One Dog Year" has John D. Rockefeller both too old to die and already dead and almost making it sky-ward; he believes that "Birth is a dream, spontaneous and innate" and death, "a slow, false, divine calamity." Language soars in unexpected directions: "On the brink of time, when he stands at last, he sings." And strange happenings make perfect sense as people do what they have to do to metabolize grief and its bubbly sidekick, love. When Moffett's not at his best he gets stuck in strange mode, but it hardly matters when so many are so good. This collection will leave readers grateful to have encountered characters who are as odd as they are, as sad as they may be, and as stupidly hopeful.
