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Bobcat & Other Stories (2013)

by Rebecca Lee(Favorite Author)

3.85 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1616202653 (ISBN13: 9781616202651)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

review 1: Bobcat and Other Stories is a collection of seven short stories by Canadian-born author and professor of creative writing, Rebecca Lee. In this masterpiece of contemporary fiction, Lee gives the reader a wide range of topics, settings and characters: there is enough variety to please almost every reading taste. The first story, Bobcat gathers together at a Manhattan dinner party, publishers, writers, lawyers and the victim of a bobcat attack; in it, marital infidelity, pregnancy, Salman Rushdie and cannibalism all feature. In The Banks of the Vistula, a plagiarising student finds her actions have unexpected and undesired consequences; it touches on Communism, linguistic freedom and propaganda. Slatland is a beautiful story on getting perspective and explores the expectati... moreon of happiness in life. In Min, a woman finds herself earnestly performing the task of vetting prospective brides for a good friend. World Party and Fialta both examine the influence of respected elders on the younger generation, but in vastly different ways. Settlers manages to include marriage, miscarriage, Amazons and Clinton. Lee’s characters, even in these short stories have depth and charm; her plots are original with interesting twists; her prose is often beautifully descriptive: “…I heard about a thousand birds cry, and I craned my neck to see them lighting out from the tips of the elms. They looked like ideas would if released suddenly from the page and given bodies – shocked at how blood actually felt as it ran through the veins, as it sent them wheeling into the west, wings raking, straining against the requirements of such a physical world.” and occasionally breath-taking: “She wasn’t completely drunk but calculated that she would be in about forty-five minutes. Her body was like a tract of nature that she understood perfectly – a constellation whose movement across the night sky she could predict, or a gathering storm, or maybe, more accurately, a sparkling stream of elements into which she introduced alcohol with such careful calibration that her blood flowed exactly as she desired, uphill and down, intersecting precisely, chemically, with time and fertility.” This taste of Lee’s work will stimulate readers to seek out more works by this fine author.
review 2: I enjoyed reading the title story ("Bobcat"). However I quickly found myself bummed out that nearly every one of these stories is about academics, most of whom have books of various levels of brilliance published. If this book is to be believed, the ivory tower is filled with snarky dinner parties in which one husband or another has written a book of brilliant essays. Nice life, I guess? These are indisputably well-written stories, but the subject matter often left me cold. less

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