Why I Don't Write
And Other Stories
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A “clear-eyed and fearless” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of ten short stories from the award-winning author of Evening
“Tender, precise, emotional, insightful, and funny.”—JULIANNE MOORE
A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through a protest encampment in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust.
In each of these stories Susan Minot explores the difficult geometry of human relations, the lure of love and physical desire, and the lifelong quest for meaning and connection. Her characters are all searching for truth, in feeling and in action, as societal norms are upended and justice and coherence flounder.
Urgent and immediate, stunningly observed, deeply felt, and gorgeously written, the stories in Why I Don't Write showcase an author at the top of her form.
“Intimate, adventurous, stark and lyrical . . . Few short story collections shine as brightly.”—Portland Press-Herald
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Minot (Thirty Girls) finds hints of violence, grief, and trauma in her characters' interior lives in this precise, shimmering collection. In "Polepole," American journalist Daisy regrets an affair with a married Englishman stationed in Kenya, where he slaps a boy across the face for vandalizing his Jeep. "Occupied" follows a woman walking past an Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan while remembering the attacks on 9/11 and reflecting on the breakup with the father of her eight-year-old son ("the place where he'd been was a ripped hole"). While the analogy to the World Trade Center's "perpetual crater of construction" initially feels unbalanced, Minot brilliantly subverts Ivy's self-absorption and gives her a rude awakening. Amid the conventional narratives are shorter, fragmentary stories. Of these, only the title story stands out, in which a constant, distracting stream of information passes through the narrator's consciousness ("Your system must be overloaded. Or you have a virus"; "Fifty-three dead not including the shooter"). In "The Language of Cats and Dogs," the collection's strongest entry, a woman looks back on her professor's sexual advances 40 years earlier in Boston, when she was 20, observing how the resulting fear and shame would forever alter her encounters with men. Minot's sly, layered approach marks an impressive reimagining of 1980s minimalism.
