Description:
Cementing her mastery across genres, Catherine Lacey returns with a new collection of visceral and absurdist short fiction.
Across the nine stories in My Stalkers, Catherine Lacey's second collection of short fiction, women are constantly confronted with the thrill, banality, and horror of becoming someone else--or no one at all--on account of men, technology, bureaucracy, or their own folly. A woman finds a coat that isn't hers in the house, and its appearance sets off a chain of events that destroys her life as she knew it. A mountain, one kilometer high, spontaneously materializes in rural Kansas, composed entirely of semiconscious men, provoking a female amateur athlete to climb it. An American living in Mexico is forced to face her irrevocable dependence on her home country, and the fragility of her own identity, when her passport is stolen. A woman is charged with a crime her all-seeing government insists it has photographic evidence of her committing, though she insists it was a doppelgänger, and while attempting to dispute the charge, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy becomes increasingly manipulative. And in the title story, a woman desperate to live any life but her own works as a Life Rotator, anonymously shuffled between a series of sparsely furnished homes in average American cities; her stalker finds her anyway, and threatens to topple her artificial stability. With penetrating insights into the absurdities of modern life, Lacey once again reveals the disquieting and darkly humorous forces at work beneath the surface of the ordinary.Brief description: Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, the short story collection Certain American States, and The Möbius Book. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Library Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Review Quotes: "Lacey combines the comic absurdity and fantastical conceits of George Saunders with the cool and sardonic tone of Donald Barthelme in stories that ask what it means to have an identity and how it might be disrupted. Once again, Lacey proves she's a consummate stylist." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)