Life Among the Terranauts
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the “enthralling” (New York Times Book Review) and “beautiful” (Washington Post) debut novel The Vexations comes an exciting new story collection that is “perfect for fans of George Saunders and Karen Russell” (Booklist), moving boldly between the real and the surreal
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
Following her “marvelous” (Wall Street Journal) first novel, Caitlin Horrocks returns with a much-anticipated collection of short stories. In her signature, genre-defying style, she explodes our notions of what a story can do and where it can take us.
Life Among the Terranauts demonstrates all the inventiveness that won admirers for Horrocks’s first collection. In “The Sleep,” reprinted in Best American Short Stories, residents of a town in the frigid Midwest decide to hibernate through the bitter winters. In the title story, half a dozen people move into an experimental biodome for a shot at a million dollars, if they can survive two years. And in “Sun City,” published in The New Yorker, a young woman meets her grandmother’s roommate in the wake of her death and attempts to solve the mystery of whether the two women were lovers.
As the Boston Globe noted of her first collection, Horrocks is a master of “wild yet delicately handled satire,” a “sprightly heartbreak” in which she is able to “mingle a note of tenderness in the desolation.” With its startling range—from Norwegian trolls to Peruvian tour guides—Life Among the Terranauts once again dazzles readers, cementing Horrocks’s reputation as one of the premier young writers of our time.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Caitlin Horrocks’ characters are trapped. Sometimes literally—the unsettling title story is set in an experimental underground biodome whose self-contained society is starting to crumble—and more often by their own circumstances in what one character describes as “the places people want to leave.” This is Horrocks’ second volume of short stories, and she has a gift for piercing to the heart of emotionally charged situations. One story follows a middle-aged nurse whose Norwegian houseguests make her reexamine her stalled-out life; another revolves around a woman settling her late grandmother’s affairs while trying to figure out whether her grandma’s roommate Bev was something more. We love the way Horrocks injects her stories with a matter-of-fact sense of strangeness or magic. In her hands, outlandish situations like a small Upper Midwest town that decides to literally go into hibernation every winter or the journey of 21st-century pioneers struggling on a modern Oregon Trail seem perfectly reasonable. Life Among the Terranauts is as delightful as it is haunting. We felt like each story subtly expanded our world—or at least the way we think about it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vigorous and supremely crafted, Horrocks's second collection (after the novel The Vexations) explores human frailties, desires, and mechanisms for survival. In "The Sleep," family man Al Rasmussen persuades the fellow residents of his moribund Midwestern town to sleep through the winter (" Don't try to convince me,' Al said, that anything worthwhile happens in this town during January and February. I've lived here as long as you have' "). A posse of high school girls are haunted by their favorite fortune-telling games in "Better Not Tell You Now," and a former-cult member turned real estate agent takes his estranged son on a Boston-area college tour in "Chance Me." After a gruesome act of violence in "Teacher," an elementary school teacher considers whether one can really know how a student will turn out. The title story, one of the most arresting and inventive of the bunch, follows a small group of scientists, engineers, and a philosopher who live in an isolated artificial ecosystem, vying for the chance to win a small fortune. With 187 days to go and their faith in survival unraveling into disorder, the possibility of cannibalism becomes increasingly likely. Horrocks's linguistic finesse and narrative range is impressive, and she brings incisive humor, pathos, and wit to her characters and their predicaments. The result is an immersive and engaging work that astutely captures the complexities of the human condition.
