Some Possible Solutions E-Book

Helen Phillips

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In a spine-tingling new collection, the unique and wickedly funny Helen Phillips offers an idiosyncratic series of "what-ifs" about our fragile human condition What if you knew the exact date of your death? What if your perfect hermaphrodite match existed on another planet? What if your city was filled with doppelgangers of you? In these remarkably inventive stories Helen Phillips' characters search for solutions to the problem of survival in an irrational, infinitely strange world. We meet a wealthy woman who purchases a high-tech sex toy in the shape of a man, a mother convinced that her children are from another planet, and orphaned twin sisters who work as futuristic strippers. As they strive for intimacy and struggle to resolve their fraught relationships with each other, and with themselves, we realise these dystopias are uncannily close to our own world. By turns surreal, witty, and perplexing, these bewitching stories are ultimately a reflection of our own reality and of the biggest existential questions we all face Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, the Italo Calvino Prize and more. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, also published by Pushkin Press. Her debut collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable book by The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

Leseprobe

PUSHKIN PRESS

SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

“This stunning collection establishes Helen Phillips as one of the most interesting and talented writers working today. In atmosphere and setting, her stories are often reminiscent of Kafka and Atwood, yet her voice and style are entirely her own. A fascinating, unsettling, and beautifully written work”

Emily St John Mandel, author of Station Eleven

“I love Helen Phillips’s wild, brilliant, eccentric brain. Her vision flashes down like a lightning bolt into everyday terrors—but in a way so wonderfully awry that every single story has a freshness to it that comes as a shock to the reader’s system”

Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

“Comparisons to Margaret Atwood and Karen Russell would not be unjust, nor would they be helpful; Phillips is carving her own, messier territory. As beautifully as she embraces and executes the fantastical, she’s even better when the surreal remains a mere lurking possibility”

New York Times

“Phillips plays out for us what might happen if the impossible were possible … She is a master at building slightly askew worlds that resemble our own but allow for the inexplicable, the astonishing, the surreal”

LA Times

“Helen Phillips sings like a Siren on the page (if a Siren also had a killer sense of humor) … these tales are true originals, shining their eerie, lovely lights on the water and asking questions that linger”

Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia

“Phillips holds a mirror up to society, pushing us to think critically about the idiosyncrasies of modern life … Like Margaret Atwood and Lorrie Moore, she has a knack for combining the strange, the speculative, and the mundane into an unpredictable array of stories. Like our best thinkers and futurists, she has the audacity to extrapolate the perhaps-possible, to explore potential answers to some of our deepest, unspoken questions”

Chicago Review of Books

“A surreal, disturbing assemblage of worlds, each complete and somehow totally convincing despite their strangeness … a delight—there is joy in its darkness, and pleasure in its exuberant imagination”

Buzzfeed, Best Fiction Books of 2016

“Things happen that cannot happen. Marriages, motherhood, dinner parties, the future—Helen Phillips shows us the uncanny seams of ordinary lives and wishes. I recommend the experience to any and all—this is an essential collection”

Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

“Captivating … Some Possible Solutions is a dark read filled with people in pain and lives upended by the most unpredictable of circumstances. But it’s also tremendously hopeful”

The Rumpus

“The short stories in this darkly absorbing collection remind us of the hope and humanity, the warmth, joy, and love that can be found in even the bleakest circumstances … Phillips proves yet again that she is an intuitive, emotionally resonant writer who is willing to consider some of life’s biggest questions and offer, yes, a few possible solutions”

Kirkus starred review

“Phillips’s gift is for making the peculiar seem like it’s happening down the street”

O Magazine

“Helen Phillips’s stories are endlessly funny and razor sharp—and, okay, a little weird—filled with strange scenarios that’ll have you asking, ‘What if?’”

Elle

SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

STORIES

HELEN PHILLIPS

PUSHKIN PRESS

For Adam

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONTHE KNOWERS SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS THE DOPPELGÄNGERS THE MESSY JOY OF THE FINAL THROES OF THE DINNER PARTY LIFE CARE CENTER THE JOINED FLESH AND BLOOD WHEN THE TSUNAMI CAME GAME ONE OF US WILL BE HAPPY; IT’S JUST A MATTER OF WHICH ONE THINGS WE DO R CHILDREN THE WORST HOW I BEGAN TO BLEED AGAIN AFTER SIX ALARMING MONTHS WITHOUT THE BEEKEEPER THE WEDDING STAIRS CONTAMINATION GENERATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORABOUT THE PUBLISHER COPYRIGHT

THE KNOWERS

1.

There are those who wish to know, and there are those who don’t wish to know. At first Tem made fun of me in that condescending way of his (a flick of my nipple, a grape tossed at my nose) when I claimed to be among the former; when he realized I meant it, he grew anxious, and when he realized I really did mean it, his anxiety morphed into terror.

“Why?” he demanded tearfully in the middle of the night.

I couldn’t answer. I had no answer.

“This isn’t only about you, you know,” he said. “It affects me too. Actually, maybe it affects me more than it affects you. I don’t want to sit around for a bunch of decades awaiting the worst day of my life.”

Touched, I reached out to squeeze his hand in the dark. Grudgingly, he squeezed back. I would have preferred to be like Tem, of course I would have! If only I could have known it was possible to know and still accepted ignorance. But now that the technology had been mastered, the knowledge was available to every citizen for a nominal fee.

Tem stood in the doorway as I buttoned the blue wool coat he’d given me for, I think, our four-year anniversary a couple years back.