Something in my eye: stories

✍ Scribed by Michael Jeffrey Lee

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 106 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1936747375

✦ Synopsis

An "intriguing and highly original" debut short story collection --winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction (Booklist)****.

Michael Jeffrey Lee's stories are bizarre and smart and stilted, like dystopic fables told by a redneck Samuel Beckett. Outcasts hunker under bridges, or hole up in bars, waiting for the hurricane to hit. Lee's forests are full of menace too--unseen crowds gather at the tree-line, and bands of petty crooks and marauders bluster their way into suicidal games of one-upmanship . . .

In Something In My Eye , violence and idleness are always in tension, ratcheting up and down with an eerie and effortless force. Diction leaps between registers with the same vertiginous swoops, moving from courtly formality to a slang that is the characters' own. It's a masterful performance, and Lee's inventiveness accomplishes that very rare feat--hyper-stylized structure and language that offer both clarity...