Overview:
This first collection of stories by the author of The City Is a Rising Tide microscopically examines the familiar motifs of infidelity, apathy, and unrequited love, revealing through each incisive tale deeper, novelistic layers of humanity and truth. Each of Lee’s stories is told from a first-person perspective, and many of them take place on college campuses. They are all centered on unique and arresting set-pieces and showcase astonishing prose: as the dinner party in the title story disintegrates multiple marriages, the meal “is revealed as a collection of crazy bones”; in “The Banks of the Vistula,” a student plagiarizes her paper, accidentally revealing the shadowy past of her professor who “looked like a dream one might have in childhood”; and in the final, heartrending story, “Settlers,” which is also the collection’s shortest, a woman in the middle of a protracted miscarriage considers her baby, “with a heartbeat measuring once a minute, like one of those sea creatures that live at the floor of the ocean.” Lee writes with an unflinching eye toward the darkest and saddest aspects of life, often finding humor where least expected. This fresh, provocative collection, peerless in its vehement elucidation of contemporary foibles, is not to be missed.
“The collection has so many good passages – whole paragraphs that move into pages with never a misstep – that any linguaphile could spend a great afternoon in a little spasm of dazzle. But a story is more than a collection of words, and these seven long tales demonstrate Lee’s prodigious talent for creating not just great lines but intricately structured, impressively plotted worlds.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Mesmerizingly strange . . . Full of shivers and frissons . . . Highly imaginative stories . . . [Lee’s] eccentric eloquence . . . makes Bobcat so potent and unpredictable.”—Janet Maslin for The New York Times
“Sometimes you reach the end of a story and go quietly, ‘Oh.’ And sometimes you gasp and go, ‘Holy guacamole!’ Not because a building fell down or a character died, but because the unexpected yet completely understandable came to pass—and made you fall off your chair. Again and again this happens in Rebecca Lee's slim, sly, brilliant book Bobcat.”—Oprah.com
"Wise and funny . . . A near-perfect collection." —Entertainment Weekly
“With deadpan humor, Lee’s light touch illuminates the contrasts in everyday life—warmth and cold, past and present, beauty and terror—imbuing her realistic tales with quiet depth.” —Bust
"Astonishing prose . . . This fresh, provocative collection, peerless in its vehement elucidation of contemporary foibles, is not to be missed." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Make some room in your tote bag for this: ‘Bobcat,’ a slim volume of short stories by a prodigiously talented writer, Rebecca Lee. Her work is at once effortless and exacting, sophisticated and ribald.” —Denver Post
“A breath of fresh air, squarely realist, but possessed of some of its own strange magic, the kind of book that it feels right to call ‘dazzling’ and ‘understated’ in the same breath.”—Flavorwire
"Lee covers a wide terrain in only seven stories, touching on fidelity, sacrifice, jealousy, and obligation, with stories that often dial out slowly from tightly-focused beginnings." —PublishersWeekly.com, "Best Summer Books 2013" list
"A shining example of furious and smart writing." —LibraryJournal.com
“An arresting and distinctive short story collection . . . Lee’s gorgeously crafted, scintillating stories are imaginative and incisive, funny and profound.” —Booklist
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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