Hydroplane
Fictions
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Hydroplane is a story collection filled with the urgency of erotic obsession. Its breathless voices, palpable in their desire, are propelled by monomania, rushing from one preoccupation into another: a garage, a painting class, a basketball game, boys. Their words take on kinetic force, an almost headlong momentum, as though, while reading, one were picking up speed, veering out of control. The past returns. Rumination are continuous. A stranger at a bus stop is indistinguishable from the narrator’s deceased grandfather; party guests turn ghoulish, festivities merge with nightmares.
Each of Steinberg’s stories builds as if telegraphed. Each sentence glissades into the next as though in perpetual motion, as characters, crippled by loss, rummage through their recollections looking for buffers to an indistinct future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The dozen moody stories of Steinberg's second collection (after The End of Free Love) buzz with a tangible erotic tension, sometimes laced with loneliness, sometimes urgent with desire. In the title tale, high school memories of bad-girl behavior color the narrator's fraught encounter with a man who stops to change her flat tire on a lonely, rain-slicked highway. The same slippery overlap of present and past energizes the spooky "The Last Guest," in which the narrator's meeting with an aloof red-haired man, the last to arrive at a house party, triggers memories of the seventh grade: both the physical charge of dry-humping with a "boy-looking girl" and the perversity with which the two friends stalked a redheaded boy now grown into the mysterious man. Snapshots of a beach vacation form "Static," about a teenage girl who tests the power of her newfound sexuality ("always a cocktease, always wriggling") while she observes her father with his girlfriends, "every summer a new bleach-blonde with toothpick legs." Experimental but never opaque, Steinberg's stories seethe with real and imagined menace.
