A stunning short story collection from the New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers and Little Children, featuring stories focusing on Tom Perrotta's familiar suburban nuclear families
The new collection from the New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers and Little Children, featuring stories focusing on Perrotta's familiar suburban nuclear families
Tom Perrotta's first book, Bad Haircut, consisted of linked stories featuring a shared protagonist. Now, nineteen years later, he has written and compiled his first true short story collection. This twelve story book features a group set in Perrotta's trademark suburban setting, focusing on the fissures in families and unexpected connections among members of typical American communities, including "Senior Season" and "Nine Inches". Others offerings here showcase Perrotta's assured, smooth writing, but may surprise fans with new protagonists and concerns. One of these twistier stories is "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face", which was the Boston Book Festival's first all-city One City, One Story selection in 2010.
Following up on his dramatic and bestselling novel The Leftovers, now an HBO series, Nine Inches is a varied and interesting audiobook from one of our most thoughtful and elegant writers.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Awards
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Release date
September 24, 2013 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781427235305
- File size: 199229 KB
- Duration: 06:55:03
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 8, 2013
Told with wit and grace, Perrotta’s (The Leftovers) story collection lays bare the shifting relationships we all suffer and seldom comprehend, presenting characters who are ambushed by the hidden intentions of people they thought they knew. After discovering his wife’s infidelities, one man wonders how “he could have spent so much time on earth... and understood almost nothing about his life and the lives of the people he was closest to.” This lament could be echoed by many of the characters in these stories: the lonely grandmother, the disappointed father, the pizza delivery boy who didn’t get into college. A former high school football player, suffering a severe concussion, remarks, “One day you feel pretty decent, the next you’re a wreck.” A doctor separated from his wife observes that “good things turned to shit all the time, and you couldn’t always see it coming.” Yet the stories aren’t all bleak; Perrotta allows some of his characters to find redemption, such as a mother who chaperones a high school party and forges an unexpected friendship with a cop who once pointlessly hassled her and her daughter: “For a little while, it’s like the world just stops, and there’s nothing you can do but sit tight and wait for it to start moving again.” -
Perrotta is better known as a novelist (ELECTION, LITTLE CHILDREN), but his stories cover much the same territory--unhappy, damaged people in the New Jersey suburbs. That may sound depressing, but, especially with the cheerful, witty readings they get here, they lean more toward the entertaining. Andi Arndt covers the women, but the credits do not assign the male narrators to the male protagonists. Not to worry, though: All three keep the stories from being about losers by balancing the undertone of despair with an equally important tone of humor. D.M.H. (c) AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
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