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Hardcover Phone Calls from the Dead Book

ISBN: 1565122453

ISBN13: 9781565122451

Phone Calls from the Dead

A bodybuilder is charged with superhuman energy and an ability to make lightbulbs explode. A grieving father tries to communicate with his dead son via a tape recorder. A high school girl claims to have her uncle's nipple in an envelope. A thirtysomething woman is fired from her dead-end job at Manpower and comes to understand her life through the experience of a German shepherd. Four ornery squirrels, tied together by their tails, struggle to maintain their sanity. Ten stories in all, the highly original PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD pulses with meaning. Alive and odd and needy, the characters in Wendy Brenner's stories grapple with the extraordinary and the ordinary, searching for answers from unlikely sources, striving to connect with each other and with something greater than themselves. Amidst a world of technological, natural, and possibly supernatural phenomena, they struggle with the most human of losses and longings. Named one of twenty-five fiction writers to watch by Writer's Digest (along with Allegra Goodman, Jhumpa Lahiri, and William Gay), Brenner has been paving a new path through American fiction ever since her first collection, Large Animals in Everyday Life. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, described that collection as "chock-full of pitch-perfect dialogue and dead-on descriptions . . . intoxicatingly original." In PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD, the stories do just that, and then go a step farther. Whether it moves you to uncontrollable laughter or to tears, you won't soon forget Wendy Brenner's work.

Recommended

Format: Hardcover

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Customer Reviews

3 ratings

Funny, surreal, original, time worth spending

I laughed the whole way through this book. I needed to read just one a day and let it reverberate in my mind. I was trying to save the stories for an upcoming vacation, but each day I gave into the temptation to read one more. I found myself thinking "yes, exactly!" even during parts of the stories that were surreal. They were somehow "right" in the same way that a bizarre dream can seem right; it only seems odd when you begin to describe it to someone else.

superb

this is an important and eloquent collection, from one of the finest young short story writers in the land.

Very cool, wonderful, groovy stories

This book is so amazing-- funny, witty, super intelligent-- and ultimately so moving. I really was swept up in it. Her characters (even the squirrels) all have incredibly rich and complicated reactions to events-- interpreting them in utterly private and sometimes hilarious ways. I don't think I've ever read a book of stories that sustained such a high pitch of intelligence and emotion. This is a writer who has listened to the culture, and has found it not wanting, but complicated and full-blooded and emotional and fascinating.
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