Wait Till You See Me Dance
Stories
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Deb Olin Unferth’s stories are so smart, fast, full of heart, and distinctive in voice—each an intense little thought-system going out earnestly in search of strange new truths. What an important and exciting talent.”—George Saunders
For more than ten years, Deb Olin Unferth has been publishing startlingly askew, wickedly comic, cutting-edge fiction in magazines such as Granta, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, NOON, and The Paris Review. Her stories are revered by some of the best American writers of our day, but until now there has been no stand-alone collection of her short fiction.
Wait Till You See Me Dance consists of several extraordinary longer stories as well as a selection of intoxicating very short stories. In the chilling “The First Full Thought of Her Life,” a shooter gets in position while a young girl climbs a sand dune. In “Voltaire Night,” students compete to tell a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. In “Stay Where You Are,” two oblivious travelers in Central America are kidnapped by a gunman they assume to be an insurgent—but the gunman has his own problems.
An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable and lighthearted, but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal, in terrifying clarity, the rage, despair, and profound mournfulness that have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality, a quality that is reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders, but in Unferth’s unforgettable collection she carves out territory that is entirely her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title story of this collection of 39 short, odd, funny, disturbing stories features a burned-out ESL instructor who drives her co-worker, the office assistant, to a dance. When the assistant falls down a well during a pit stop, the instructor threatens to abandon her if she doesn't help one of the instructor's students a gifted musician whose English is terrible receive a passing grade on his end-of-semester standardized test. The instructor interrupts her narrative three times to discuss It's a Wonderful Life. In "Voltaire Night," students from adult education evening classes compete at telling the worst thing that ever happened to them. Travel tales include "Stay Where You Are," in which a lone rebel takes a tourist couple hostage, and "Welcome," about a foreigner who has outstayed her welcome. Unferth's (Minor Robberies) stories can be as short as one paragraph and often lack plot, names, or segues. One character is called simply "Vice President of Pretzels," which is all that's needed to understand that he won't be any help to his customer. "37 Seconds" consists of a list of fleeting impressions that add up to a man and a woman having an argument. Both traditionally told stories like "Pet" and ingeniously structured pieces like "An Opera Season" and "Abandon Normal Instruments" showcase Unferth's razor-sharp conversational prose and idiosyncratic blend of normal and weird, idealistic and disillusioned.
