In Lori Ostlund’s debut collection people seeking escape from situations at home venture out into a world that they find is just as complicated and troubled as the one they left behind.
In prose highlighted by both satire and poignant observation, Ostlund offers characters that represent a different sort of everyman—men and women who poke fun at ideological rigidity while holding fast to good grammar and manners, people seeking connections in a world that seems increasingly foreign. In “Upon Completion of Baldness” a young woman shaves her head for a part in a movie in Hong Kong that will help her escape life with her lover in Albuquerque. The precocious narrator of “All Boy” finds comfort when he is locked in a closet by a babysitter. In “Dr. Deneau’s Punishment” a math teacher leaving New York for Minnesota as a means of punishing himself engages in an unsettling method of discipline. A lesbian couple whose relationship is disintegrating flees to the Moroccan desert in “The Children beneath the Seat.” And in “Idyllic Little Bali” a group of Americans gathers around a pool in Java to discuss their brushes with fame and ends up witnessing a man’s fatal flight from his wife.
In the eleven stories in The Bigness of the World we see that wherever you are in the world, where you came from is never far away.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Ostlund's remarkable debut collection deftly navigates the treacherous shoals of decaying relationships in which the protagonists often escape to faraway lands in order to find themselves, or, at the very least, their partners. Fate, for the globe-trotting teacher-entrepreneur of And Down We Went, takes the form of an untimely bird dropping; in Bed Death, it is a Malay waitress who casually takes a sip of orange juice from the narrator's glass. Ostlund's artful prose is playfully complex and illuminating, evocative and unsentimental, as in Upon the Completion of Baldness, in which the narrator's girlfriend returns home from a trip completely bald. Remarks the narrator, the chilly desert air seemed to startle her as though, in that moment, she realized that there was a price to be paid for having no hair, and while I still said nothing, I was happy to see her suffer just a bit. A specific disenchantment inhabits these stories—the disenchantment of the uncompromising romantic confronted with the evaporative nature of love. Each piece is sublime. (Oct.)
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Review
"These sly stories are funny and unpredictable and graced with priceless details you'll carry with you long after the last page is turned. Whether charting the loneliness of youth, or tracing the emotional upheavals of lovers abroad, Ostlund proves to be a wise, charming, and irresistible guide." --Eric Puchner, author of Music Through the Floor: Stories
"The Bigness of the World is simply a stunning collection--every story jewel-crafted and resonant. I read stories to meet people I do not know and have not imagined, but even in that context Lori Ostlund's people are unique. I begin by thinking that I know these characters or have known them. And then somewhere along the way, they shape shift and startle me. Over and over again I find myself looking at the world from a fresh perspective--this sharp-eyed compassionate writer's rendering of the world I thought I knew. This is a book to remake our imaginary landscape--the kind of book I not only recommend, I advocate. Read this, I want to tell people. You need these stories. You do." --Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina