Why I don't write and other stories

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Summary

"A superb collection of short fiction--her first in thirty years and spanning many geographies--from the critically acclaimed author of Monkeys, Evening, and Thirty Girls A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through protests in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust. In each of these stories Minot explores the difficult geometry of human relations, the lure of love and physical desire, and the lifelong quest for meaning and connection. Her characters are all searching for truth, in feeling and in action, as societal norms are upended and justice and coherence flounder. Urgent and immediate, precisely observed, deeply felt, and gorgeously written, the stories in Why I Don't Write showcase an author at the top of her form"--

Contents

Polepole
torch
Occupied
Green glass
Why I don't write
While it lasts
Café Mort
Boston Common at twilight
Listen
language of cats and dogs.

Published Reviews

Booklist Review: "Minot, the author of five sterling novels, including Thirty Girls (2014), presents her first short story collection in three decades. The opening two out of 10 pristine stories resemble poetry in their short lines, plays in their stacked dialogue, texts and tweets in their bursts, each a jolt. The rest are fully formed, often erotic, gorgeous, and searing. Minot is a shock-to-the-system storyteller focused on the predator-prey dynamic in unsought or violent sexual encounters. A woman's preoccupation with an indifferent lover puts her at risk when she visits the Occupy Wall Street protest site. Documentarian Daisy falls into an unnerving situation in Kenya with a married journalist. A teenage boy's naive attempt to buy pot on the street leads to shocking violence, while a student's relationship with a teacher highlights the fact that women are always in danger alone with men. "Café Mort" is a surprising, surreal, eerie, yet funny take on grief. Minot is exceptionally attuned to forces intimate and social, and her gift for potent distillation yields stories that are stunning in every sense of the word."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review: "Minot (Thirty Girls) finds hints of violence, grief, and trauma in her characters' interior lives in this precise, shimmering collection. In "Polepole," American journalist Daisy regrets an affair with a married Englishman stationed in Kenya, where he slaps a boy across the face for vandalizing his Jeep. "Occupied" follows a woman walking past an Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan while remembering the attacks on 9/11 and reflecting on the breakup with the father of her eight-year-old son ("the place where he'd been was a ripped hole"). While the analogy to the World Trade Center's "perpetual crater of construction" initially feels unbalanced, Minot brilliantly subverts Ivy's self-absorption and gives her a rude awakening. Amid the conventional narratives are shorter, fragmentary stories. Of these, only the title story stands out, in which a constant, distracting stream of information passes through the narrator's consciousness ("Your system must be overloaded. Or you have a virus"; "Fifty-three dead not including the shooter"). In "The Language of Cats and Dogs," the collection's strongest entry, a woman looks back on her professor's sexual advances 40 years earlier in Boston, when she was 20, observing how the resulting fear and shame would forever alter her encounters with men. Minot's sly, layered approach marks an impressive reimagining of 1980s minimalism. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Aug.)"
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Additional Information

Subjects	Short stories, American Short stories Literature Short Stories Fiction Short stories. Audiobooks.
Publisher	[Place of publication not identified] :Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group,2020 Books on Tape2020
Contributors	OverDrive, Inc.
Participants/Performers	Alex McKenna.
Language	English
System Details	Mode of access: World Wide Web. Format: OverDrive Listen Format: OverDrive MP3 Audiobook Requires OverDrive app 3.0 (Windows) / 1.0 (Mac) / 1.0 (Windows Mobile)
Description	1 audio file : digital
ISBN	9780593212097 0593212096
Other	Classic View