The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Five thousand years out of the labyrinth, the Minotaur finds himself in the American South, living in a trailer park and working as a line cook at a steakhouse. No longer a devourer of human flesh, the Minotaur is a socially inept, lonely creature with very human needs. But over a two-week period, as his life dissolves into chaos, this broken and alienated immortal awakens to the possibility for happiness and to the capacity for love.
Steven Sherrill is a graduate of UNC Charlotte and holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The recipient of a NEA Fellowship for Fiction, he has published four novels and one book of poetry. His debut novel, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, was published in the UK and translated into eight languages. Neil Gaiman selected it as one of six audio books to launch “Neil Gaiman Presents” for Audible.com. A prolific painter and nascent musician, Sherrill is now a professor of English & Integrative Arts at Penn State Altoona.
" . . . [W]ry, melancholy, beautiful first novel . . . " —The Guardian
"Sherrill's narrative, with its dreamlike pace, shows myth coexisting with reality as naturally as it does in ancient epic." —Publishers Weekly
"Wise and ingenious" —The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull supposedly slain by Theseus in the labyrinth, is actually working as a cook at Grub's Rib in a small town in North Carolina. Or so Sherrill conjectures in his clever debut novel, which thrusts the fabulous beast into the kitchen sink realism of 1990s America. In Sherrill's bold imagination, the Minotaur is no longer angry or ferocious, having been worn down by 3,000 years of history. Although people are often startled by his horns, the blue-collar world in which he now exists quickly adjusts to his presence. Sweeny, the owner of the Lucky-U trailer park where the Minotaur lives, employs him part-time to repair cars. The Minotaur spends his free hours watching his neighbors, among whom are an amateur muscle freak, Hank, and his sexy wife, Josie. At the restaurant, the other employees accept the Minotaur as he is, except for Shane and Mike, a duo of obnoxious young waiters who also razz David, the restaurant manager, for being gay. The Minotaur is sometimes hindered physically in the human world; his eyes, for example, are separated so broadly by his snout that he has to cock his head to one side to really look at something. Sherrill also insinuates other mythological beasts--the Hermaphroditus, the Medusa--into the story, suggesting how the Southern landscape is shadowed by these myths. The plot centers around the Minotaur's feelings for Kelly, a waitress who is prone to epileptic fits. Does she reciprocate his affections? As the reader might expect, the course of interspecies love never does run smooth. Sherrill's narrative, with its dreamlike pace, shows myth coexisting with reality as naturally as it does in ancient epic.
