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Loading... Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country: and Other Storiesby Chavisa Woods
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. It was fun to see if I could figure out how all the stories connect. My favorite was "zombie". ( ) A really interesting collection of short stories, a mix of brutal realism and bizarro, of bald truth-telling and outrageous imagination. I don't know of another book that has so gotten right into the dirty reality of early 21st-century midwestern rural America, with the bleak poverty, the drug-addled lost souls, the the sense of being left behind and overlooked, the zealots and desperation, and the good people, too. It's obvious the author knows the settings and situations bone-deep. Great respect. This book of short stories focuses on life in small towns the country, particularly the Midwest. The primary characters tend to be queer in some fashion, which (whether goth or not) adds an extra layer of not fitting in. One or two don’t fit this premise, but they still fit the overall theme of surreal encounters or the strangeness of the mundane. The strangest one is “A New Mohawk” in which the main character wakes up with the Gaza Strip on his head, complete with little explosions. Overall, I enjoyed the book but I also found a few of the stories depressing. My favorite story is “Revelations,” about an old woman whose pastor’s wife has had a vision that someone in the congregation has a terrible hidden sin that must be rooted out, for that is what has caused the steady decline in parishioners over the past few years. She thinks she is the problem, only to learn of a very strange secret a few of her fellow parishioners have been keeping. no reviews | add a review
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"Capturing the lyricism of lives without a future in southern Illinois, southern Indiana, and New York City, Things to Do When You're Goth in the Countryintroduces us to Chavisa Woods's people. They are smart and poor, lost and hoping not to be found, and of high hopes but few if any expectations--inhabitants, mostly young, of a hidden country without a name that exists within America. The eight stories inThings to Do When You're Goth in the Countrybring the underbelly of America into vivid focus. The strange and unique characters in this collection include a "zombie" who secretly resides in a local cemetery; a queer teen goth who is facing ostracism from her small-town, evangelical church; a Brooklyn artist who learns more about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict than he ever wanted to; and the UFOs that trouble a group of friends in the rural Midwest. And the big sis who leaves New York City once a year to go home to see her "little little" and "big little" brothers and bear witness to the injuries from stripping copper wire from abandoned houses, and the smell of the meth lab in the woods nearby, and the sounds of the police scanner radio, and the early deaths that happen for a whole host of reasons"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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