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A Stranger in This World: Stories

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A Stranger in This World: Stories

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Overview

In the tradition of the works of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, this fiction debut shines with verbal brilliance. Disturbing yet compellingly readable, the stories in this collection explore the gap between disappointment and hope, between life as it could be and life as it is.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307826169
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/07/2012
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Kevin Canty is the award-winning author of the novels Into the Great Wide Open, Nine Below Zero, and Winslow in Love, as well as the short story collections Honeymoon and Other Stories, A Stranger in This World, and Where the Money Went. His most recent book is The Underworld: A Novel, published in 2017. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Details, Story, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. He currently teaches fiction writing at the University of Montana.

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Editorial Reviews

Kenny Kolodny's first love at 17 makes for a haunting bildungsroman. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In his first collection of stories, Canty depicts nightmarish events and situations encroaching on ordinary lives. His restrained tone underscores the sense of horrible inevitability; the reader cringes but cannot look away. The characters are indeed "strangers"; people at peculiar turning points in their lives, they're lost on what feels like familiar ground. Temporarily impaired by alcohol or sadness, they don't read situations well and make the wrong choices. In "Pretty Judy," a bright, lonely teenager deceives himself as he enters into a desperate and doomed sexual relationship with a mentally retarded young woman. In "Blue Boy," a teenage lifeguard, daydreaming about an older woman, acts on those fantasies with painful consequences. After Tina and boyfriend Bobby have murdered their abductor in "The Victim," she concludes that "events have their own current." There direction-like that of Canty's characters-cannot be altered. These very strong stories are highly recommended.-Eleanor Mitchell, Arizona State Univ. West, Phoenix

Library Journal

Expect some very high-powered authors to gush all over the back cover of Canty's first collection. Canty's polished prose is spare: what he doesn't say carries as much weight as what he unflinchingly describes. He lifts the curtain on our family and social secrets: a young lifeguard who is too stricken with an older woman to see the baby sinking in his pool; a teenager navigating between his two drunk parents and their facade of normality. In the short "Dogs," Canty puts the reader in the shoes of the man working the night shift at the animal shelter killing dogs. What if, Canty asks, you rebelled and let one go free? Would it mean anything, or would your spirit be killed as swiftly as the dogs are? And in the haunting "Moonbeams and Aspirin," a couple on the brink of divorce learn how to miss each other over drinks at the Luau Hut, then take an elderly blind man on a driving lesson. Canty has the treasured ability of making his dark material palatable, shocking, and exhilarating at the same time. A powerful new talent.

David Cline

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