| Meet Me in the Moon Room :: Small Beer Press :: Collection by Ray Vukcevich |
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Here are thirty-three weird, wonderful stories concerning men,
women, teleportation, wind-up cats, and brown paper bags. By turns
whimsical and unsettling--frequently managing to be both--these short
fictions describe family relationships, bad breakups, and travel to
outer space.
Vukcevich's loopy, fun-house mirror takes on everyday life belongs to the same absurdist school of work as that of George Saunders, David Sedaris, Ken Kalfus, and Victor Pelevin. Meet Me in the Moon Room was nominated for the Philip K. Dick and Bram Stoker Awards. ". . . the 33 brief stories in Meet Me in the Moon Room defy categorization genre. A few toy with the conventions of science fiction; others branch off from trails blazed by Donald Barthelme. Moon Room will delight those who appreciated the risks Don DeLillo took in Ratner's Star." --Hartford Courant
"There is no other planet like planet Ray."
"What other writer could make you start laughing halfway down
the front page of a story about a man putting on a sweater? Thurber
maybe, a long time ago. Buy this book."
"In Ray Vukcevich's ingenious stories the absurd and the profound
are seamlessly joined through fine writing. Meet Me in the Moon
Room is a first-rate collection." "A man pulls the sweater his girlfriend made him over his head and nearly gets lost inside it. Rescued from the arctic ice, the dying Victor (Frankenstein) tells a story that leaves little doubt that the monster is James Joyce or Stephen Dedalus or Finn (again). Tim saves the world from a comet by having his family put paper bags over their heads. What? What?! What?!! Calm down. This is just the world according to Ray Vukcevich, sf-ish enough to get him into the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov's, but also resembling the fantastic milieus of Gogol, Kafka, and Looney Toons. Whether you cotton to it depends on how you feel about cartoons made of words and prisons made of logic: are you afraid or amused? Actually, either reaction works for appreciating Vukcevich's outlandish virtuosity.
"Ray Vukcevich should be as revered as Donald Barthelme or Salvador
Dali in the pantheon of modern surrealists."
"There are thirty-three stories here, most of them no longer
than a few pages, none of them much llike anything you've ever
read before . . . these are funny, savage stories, all flint and
steel, scraps of flannel, pratfalls and prideful weirdness, sparks
falling away into darkness."
"Though deceptively simple in their pared-down style, the vignettes
show meticulous care in the crafting of oddball metaphors to express
the moods of their estranged spouses, exasperated lovers,
competitive children, and disgruntled employees. The willingness
with which the author's characters accept the incongruity of their
situations often yields profoundly moving insights into the human
condition . . . Inventive and entertaining, these stories yield more
emotional truth than much more comparatively realistic fiction." | ||||||||||
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