Music Through the Floor
Stories
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the Oprah Book Club Pick Dream State, an extraordinary debut collection of nine unforgettable stories—strikingly original, fiercely funny, and quietly heartbreaking—portraying a group of misfits attempting to navigate mainstream America.
Writing from an impressive range of perspectives—men and women, children and adults, immigrants and tourists—Puchner deftly exposes the dark, tender undersides of his characters with arresting beauty and precision. Here are people fumbling for identity in a dehumanizing world, captured in moments that are hilarious, shocking, and transcendent, sometimes all at once. Unfailingly true, surprisingly moving, and impossible to forget, these stories make up an extraordinary and strikingly original collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alienated adults and wounded children inhabit Puchner's polished debut collection, nine bittersweet stories that capture moments of truth but too often feel like neatly packaged writing workshop fiction. "Child's Play," about adolescent male cruelty and the pull of mother-son love, climaxes powerfully with a sad, graphic act of sadism when a group of boys gangs up on a social outcast. But "Essay #3: Leda and the Swan," a confessional digression from a homework assignment penned by a 16-year-old girl and a too-precious excuse for cutesy malapropisms strives too hard for poignancy in its broadly drawn vicissitudes of adolescence and blossoming sexuality. A near-death encounter during a driver's ed class in "A Fear of Invisible Tribes" almost but doesn't quite unite a bisexual Berkeley teacher and a recovering alcoholic across a class divide. In "Animals Here Below," a young brother and sister suffering in the care of their depressed father conspire na vely to bring their errant mother back into the family fold. Though Puchner delivers emotional nuance with sure-handed prose, every story turns on a loaded moment or hurtful act, a formula that becomes repetitive across the collection.
