| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
viii, 197 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm |
| Contents |
Brutto -- My heart belongs to Bertie -- On the town -- Remember me -- Climbers -- Improvisation is the heart of music -- Famous last words -- The French style of Mlle Matsumoto -- Stolen luck -- In which Nick buys a Harley -- Trevor -- Plantinga -- Entourage. |
| Summary |
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world's piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. "Look," a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove "more complicated than they had first appeared" and "at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate." In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt's signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly "taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination." |
| Subject |
Short stories.
|
| Genre/Form |
Short stories.
|
| Added Title |
Short stories. Selections
|
| ISBN |
9780811227827 (acid-free paper) |
|
0811227820 |
|
