A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions with their religious neighbours quickly escalate. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband.
Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope, each one drilling toward its characters' darkest emotional centres. In muscularly robust prose, with an unfailing eye for human drives and frailties, Chris Dennis captures the raw need, desire, cruelty, and promise that animate our lives.
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[You wet your hair in the sink, then comb it back, slick as a new trash bag - HERE IS WHAT YOU DO]***
(Soho Press, 25 June 2019, 224 pages, ebook, A Year of @EpicReads 2019, a book recommended by your book BFF, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs)
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This collection of short stories is much hyped. Unfortunately, it's never quite as good as the rave reviews read me to believe. It's not a terrible collection of stories but neither is it a particularly brilliant one either. I've read much, much worse but have also read story collections that leave this in the dust such as The Wheel of Love and Other Stories by Joyce Carol Oates. The stories in this collection are okay and not all of them work. The best one is the title story.
