Orientation and Other Stories
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3.2 • 36 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Breakfast's boiled egg, the overhead hum of fluorescent lights, the midmorning coffee break—daily routines keep the world running. But when people are pushed—by a coworker's taunt, a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall from a bridge—cracks appear, revealing alienation, casual cruelty, madness, and above all a simultaneous hunger for and fear of the unknown.
Daniel Orozco leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night supermarket trips for cookie binges, exceptional data entry, and an exiled dictator's occasional piss on the U.S. embassy. A love affair blooms between two officers in the impartially worded pages of a police blotter; a new employee's first-day office tour includes descriptions of other workers' most private thoughts and actions; during an earthquake, the consciousness of the entire state of California shakes free for examination.
Orientation introduces a writer at the height of his powers, whose work surely invites us to reassess the landscape of American fiction.
Orientation is a Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Short Story Collections title.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Veteran short-fiction journeyman Orozco makes a long-overdue book debut with a rewarding collection infused with wonderfully wrought landscapes and telling glimpses of alienation. In the much anthologized title story, an omniscient tour guide takes a new hire around the cubicles, identifying the employee who is also a serial killer, several one-sided love interests, and the resident ghost of the office. The haunting "Hunger Tales" comprised sketches of people who gorge, splurge on supermarket cookies, or, like a 600-pound Iraq War veteran, eat themselves into obesity, revealing the power of food to heal, connect, and hurt. In "I Run Every Day," a pathological long-distance runner deals with the hectoring of his fellow workers and the come-ons of the new secretary, who gets as close as anyone ever has and pays a price for it. Orozco displays considerable descriptive ability with an obsessive attention to banal details, spinning archetypes to complicate a cross-section of American society. The writer's gifts are particularly apparent in "Somoza's Dream," the tale of a South American dictator in exile and his assassin. This collection has been a long time coming, and it's been worth the wait.
Customer Reviews
Orientation
This book was alive with brilliant confusion and authentic life thoughts. A staggered peek into an author willing to share only the tip of his talent. Like any complicated person, the book was hard to get to know but worth the effort in the end. A visit partly dreaded because it may be more than you can handle but anticipated because there is no chance of boredom. Kudos to a unique writing style. Jds4050