In "Thirteen Days," passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. In the title story of Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. And "Hyena" begins simply: "That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit-it was there and it came for him.Īn electric collection of new short stories from the inimitable, bestselling writer of Talk to Me and Outside Looking In
(Sept.About the Book In the title story of "Walk Between the Raindrops," a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc. No matter how unsavory the protagonists, their vulnerability eventually wins the reader’s sympathy (“Whether I was six or sixty, I was the one getting thrown out in the street,” the evicted narrator says in an internal monologue). Boyle’s stories are raw, unflinching, and highly entertaining, and his characters are often rude, pleasure-seeking men, as in “The Shape of a Teardrop,” in which the 31-year-old narrator lives with his parents and tends to his six fish tanks until his parents slap him with an eviction notice. taken over by China, the populace tightly controlled by a social credit system. The dystopian satire “SCS 750” imagines the U.S. They deal with boredom and frustration, and a marital spat prompts a woman to break protocol by leaving her “shitbird” husband in the “cage” of their cabin. In “The Thirteenth Day,” an outbreak of Covid-19 on a cruise ship requires all the 2,666 passengers to quarantine for 14 days after the last new case, which they fear won’t come until everyone gets it. In “These Are the Circumstances,” a suburban husband kills a rattlesnake in his backyard, with disastrous results. Boyle ( Talk to Me) skewers American culture, masculine identity, and the modern age in his splendid latest collection.
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