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Library | Material Type | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Location |
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Searching... Fairfield Area Library | Book | 38674121085011 | FICTION MEIJER | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal 's Best Short Story Collections of 2019. One of Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Tor.com 's Books to Read in February.
"Sharp, haunting . . . [Meijer] writes wonderfully of the trap of the self, with its impossible prisons of circumstance and identity, not to mention the perversity of being buried alive, alone, inside a body." --Merritt Tierce, The New York Times Book Review
From the author of Heartbreaker , a disquieting collection tracing the destructive consequences of the desire for connection
A man, forgotten by the world, takes care of his deaf brother while euthanizing dogs for a living. A stepbrother so desperately wants to become his stepsibling that he rapes his girlfriend. In Maryse Meijer's decidedly dark and searingly honest collection Rag , the desperate human desire for connection slips into a realm that approximates horror.
Meijer's explosive debut collection, Heartbreaker , reinvented sexualized and romantic taboos, holding nothing back. In Rag , Meijer's fearless follow-up, she shifts her focus to the dark heart of intimacies of all kinds, and the ways in which isolated people's yearning for community can breed violence, danger, and madness. With unparalleled precision, Meijer spins stories that leave you troubled and slightly shaken by her uncanny ability to elicit empathy for society's most marginalized people.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Meijer's outstanding and disturbing second collection (after Heartbreaker), her fragmented writing style produces an intense and distilled view of isolated moments - or, conversely, makes the outrageous or aberrant seem ordinary. The use of short declarative sentences, sparse adjectives, and lack of quotation marks furthers this splintered effect. In "Alice," a father observes and responds singularly to his young daughter's alarming weight gain: "We didn't say Alice was getting fat. She was." "The Lover" charts an unsettling romantic triangle, and features a gun and an unexpected kiss. The hapless hero of "Her Blood" is thrust into an uncomfortably undefined relationship when he helps a woman having a miscarriage in a bathroom stall and apparently feels a stronger connection with her than she does with her boyfriend. Not every story has a dark edge; "At the Sea" follows a father at the beach with his young daughter, later experiencing a rush of dread followed by a pleasant surprise. The strange, sensual, elliptical title story, which concludes the book, is narrated by a rag that starts out being used in mundane, household tasks but ends up being used in a murder. Though reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill, Jean Rhys, and Muriel Spark, these 14 stories bear a powerful style that is Meijer's own. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore and Co. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
This collection of horror stories about men at their lowestenraged, depressed, violentoffers an unsettling glimpse into the seething underworld of toxic masculinity.Meijer's (Northwood, 2018, etc.) firecracker debut collection, Heartbreaker, examined the wild, strange interior lives of girls and women. In this book, she strikes out into new territory, unearthing the anger and melancholy of male protagonists who revel in their own cruelty, power, and loneliness. Like Samantha Hunt and Carmen Maria Machado, Meijer wields strangeness to amplify the emotional realities of her narratorsand the consequences of their deranged, inhumane, and violent impulses. Her characters operate in worlds like our own, lusting after their customers at a local pizza shop or denying feelings they have for other men. But they are also vengeful ghosts of stillborn baby boys, rags used to murder wives, and dogs who steal the lace underthings of teenage girls. In "Pool," a teacher falls for the student lifeguard who saves his life only to reject the boy's affections. The detective in "Evidence" tracks a female serial killer but ultimately unearths his desire to become one of her victims. Other stories, like "Francis" and "Good Girls," literalize metaphors about the animalistic urges of men. But Meijer saves the scariest of all for "Viral," in which her lone female protagonist tapes and distributes a video of her former friend masturbating as an act of humiliation and revenge. "I'm in the car waiting for my boyfriend to kill her," the story opens. "She is pretty and very smart and she didn't want to go out with him and sometimes it's as simple as that. She screwed up." While at times her narrators can seem almost excessively cruel, Meijer's stories are an indictment of the indignities womenand other menface every day as they dodge or appease the dangerous impulses and appetites of misogyny.A rich, beautiful, and utterly terrifying book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Humanity has the capacity for both compassion and cruelty. The latest story collection from Meijer (Heartbreaker , 2016) brushes up against the latter extreme. The violence in each story is awkwardly manifested and horrifically consumed by the principals. A young man working in a pizza parlor is confronted with the task of cleaning up after a woman's miscarriage in the bathroom, then is folded into a tense but comforting relationship with the woman, who still frequents the place with her unaware boyfriend. A man reincarnated as a dog must live as the target of adolescent girls' indifference or playful nastiness. A man serving on a jury in a case about an unspeakable murder must cope with the brutality during a visit from his daughter. The title story is told from the perspective of a common household item that can either clean or kill. The male characters Meijer conjures face each unfolding horror with enigmatic stoicism, as though toxic masculinity is a new, unheard-of experience. The sudden disgust is perplexing, but Meijer's collection is definitely affecting and timely.--Michael Ruzicka Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The slim size of "Rag," a disturbing, forceful story collection by Maryše Meijer, belies the profusion of terrors contained within it. No matter how ordinary or powerless the character, to each unfortunate soul yet inheres a magnificent, perhaps infinite, capacity for suffering. "If she had wanted something nice to happen to her she would have chosen someone nice" serves both as a description of one woman's open-eyed masochism and a cautionary banner over a book that could be read as a field guide to varieties of misery, much of which is experienced by women and girls. In Meijer's sharp, haunting stories, most of that violence is perpetrated by men - a note she sounds without attenuation, in a way that will undoubtedly call forth protests of "Not all..." in some readers and approving nods of "Right, right, the patriarchy is a horror show" in others. Men are more violent than women, a fact we are prone to invoking not as a statistic but either meekly, as a quandary, or gravely, as a judgment; at a time of viral outrage like the #MeToo moment, we may sense gradations but are afraid to be labeled apologists. Yet the effect of a fairy tale, a designation often applied to Meijer's work - a previous collection of stories, "Heartbreaker," and a novella, "Northwood" - depends on its clear delineation of good and evil. To understand the monstrous we must draw a monster so unmistakable as to represent the opposite of an equally unmistakable innocence or virtue. To this end, then, let the man be volatile, depraved and abusive, duplicitous if not hateful, creepy if not a rapist, feckless if not heartless. Opening with "Her Blood," a story about a grisly miscarriage, and closing with "Rag," an experimental fable about a dreadfully intimate murder, Meijer traverses an impressive range of emotional, psychological and physical traumas, with a near-total investment in sketching atrocity rather than deciphering it. In that undertaking she certainly succeeds. She writes wonderfully of the trap of the self, with its impossible prisons of circumstance and identity, not to mention the perversity of being buried alive, alone, inside a body. She has a strong facility for translating interior states - "He wonders if he should give the boy money. Or a hug. He needs to figure out the appropriate gesture and then make it so he can go" - and for making acute, satisfying observations: "But the house wasn't empty. You can always tell. The pressure of living, no matter how small, pushes out from a place." Such keen insights provide breathing room from a relentless dictate that in these stories, for these characters, there shall be no desire without pain. All instances of anything approximating love or tenderness arrive in hock to cruelty. Is that sadistic? If desire itself is certainly a form of pain - because to want a connection is to experience a lack, a space that can be exploited - perhaps these stories are merely descriptive. At times the book delivers more spectacle than impact, and risks projecting a gothic mood untethered to an interpretive framework. But Meijer's willingness to write fiercely into the abyss deserves respect, and maybe the darkness of the untethering is the point, or at least an accurate depiction of life's obscenities. Any one of us may know unendurable affliction without the means to comprehend it. Merritt tierce is the author of the novel "Love Me Back."
