The Tiki King
Stories
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A Lebanese housewife, a former horror-film maker, and a cantankerous Russian librarian are among the inhabitants of the offbeat world found in this impressive debut collection. Stacy Tintocalis’s stories take us from a defunct women’s shelter off a Missouri country road to the streets of low-income Hollywood, where her characters yearn for the love that is always just out of reach.
The title story explores the conflicted emotions an adolescent boy feels toward a father who obsessively returns to his childhood home. In “Too Bad about Howie,” a divorced poet finds comfort in stolen moments with his ex-wife’s dog. Despite their longing for connection, these characters are victims of their own foibles, trapped in terrifying moments of psychic violence that risk driving away the very people they love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These 10 vigorous stories from Tintocalis mine the inner lives of Russian and Lebanese migr s and crummy California divorc s alike. Widowed librarian Alexander Valinchuk of "Another Kind of Sleep" decides he is finished with sex, so when thrust into the company of lonely nurse Doris he uses touching stories from the motherland to bolster her desperate need for a human connection. "Honeymoon in Beirut" reveals that Zahlah's dressmaker husband, Emile, has fallen in love with a bolt of silk fabric, as if making her a dress from it would achieve his celluloid dream of America. "Too Bad About Howie" makes us wonder who we should feel worse for: Hopper, who has divorced the nondescript French teacher Sally, Sally for being nondescript, or Howie, the dog beloved by Hopper but lost in the divorce. The chasm between lovers is again underscored in "The Man from Istanbul," where two academics marooned in Iowa discover that making up stories while jogging avoids the alienation that ensues from their real-life histories. Tintocalis's debut is filled with strange characters who maintain puzzling appeal despite and often because of their quirks.
