Stacey Richter

For those of you keeping track of the next generation of great American short story writers, you will be glad to know that Stacey Richter's new collection is just as crazy and perfect as her last one. Artful, seriously funny, tender, and totally human -- if Raymond Carver was a teenage girl in the 80s listening to heavy metal and making out in the backseat of a car parked outside a cafe in San Jose with a teenage Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo and some of their saliva dripped down into the show more upholstery and the DNA mixed together and some sort of new clone was animated from it -- this is what Stacey Richter is like. But better. -Steve show less

This is a book of finely constructed satires. Each narrator and character is given a distinct voice, which is important considering their wide variety, from a prepubescent boy (A Prodigy of Longing) to the ghost of an accidentally amputated leg (Rules for Being Human), the latter a considerable feat of imagination. There are others which show off a bravura technique: A Groupie, a Rock Star is a close reading of 30 seconds in the life of the title characters, and Sally's Story takes the story show more of a praeternatually gifted dog and constructs something quietly shocking.

Note that these stories are seldom comic. I laughed exactly once: "This evening Vlad is wearing black suede boots, circa 1989. A very pointy toe. He's sitting with the verbs, Pat and Bob." (Rules for Being Human)

I confess that I when I realized that the 'Satan' of the title story was merely a twentysomething geek's online name, I started to feel let down; but the story goes places so unexpected it quickly overcame the hurdle of thwarted expectation.

The stories:
The Beauty Treatment
An Island of Boyfriends
Goal 666
Sally's Story
The First Men
The Ocean
Rats Eat Cats
Rules for Being Human
Prom Night
My Date With Satan
A Groupie, a Rock Star
Goodnight
A Prodigy of Longing show less

Really, really cool short stories. Richter does an amazing job capturing the POVs of her bizarre, fucked up characters; their voices are remarkably distinct and the prose is lively. Richter reminds me somewhat of Aimee Bender or Kelly Link, although I think I may have actually enjoyed these stories more; they had a tighter narrative structure than either Bender's or Link's work, whose stories (the latter's in particular) sometimes leave me going, "What was that actually ABOUT?" Which is not show more to say Richter's dumbing it down—there is simply a clarity to her presentation and purpose. I loved both the tragic, heart-wrenching stories, like "The Beauty Treatment," and the ebullient, ridiculous ones—"Goal 666" and "Rats Eat Cats" are two of my favorites in the collection. Richter just came out with a new book, too: "Twin Study." *wants* show less

I picked up this collection after reading Richter's story in [book:Tin House: Fantastic Women]. Not every story here was "genre-bending," but that didn't matter. I loved the writing all the same, particularly the diaglogue. I read it, cover to cover, in a week--which is lightspeed for me (when I'm not reading flash fiction). This collection gets a five, though, because the connecting thread between the stories was so clear: Women on the cusp of transition, some opting to change direction show more while others don't; where either choice makes some happy, and others not so much. show less