|
 A Second Book of Short Stories by Benjamin Percy
Released by Graywolf Press in October, 2007. Now in Second Printing. Available on Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, powells.com and through any local bookseller.
Listed as one of the "Best Books of the Decade" by The L Magazine.
Long-listed for the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize.
Short-listed for the 2007 Story Prize
Winner of the Ann Powers Book-length Fiction Award, Council for Wisconsin Writers, 2008
Outstanding Achievement, Wisconsin Library Association, 2007
One of the Chicago Tribune's "Favorite Books of 2007"
French rights to Francis Geffard at Albin Michel (for publication in 2009)
British rights to Ellah Allfrey at Jonathan Cape, a division of Random House (for publication in 2008)
German rights to Verlagsgruppe Random House GMBH
Italian rights to Giuseppi Strazzeri at Mondadori (for publication in 2009)
PRAISE:
"Refresh, Refresh is a completely impressive collection of short fiction by one of our most accomplished younger writers. Benjamin Percy moves instinctively toward the molten center of contemporary writing, the place where genre fiction, in this case horror, overflows its boundaries and becomes something dark and grand and percipient. These stories contain a brutal power and are radiant with pain -- only a writer of surpassing honesty and directness could lead us here. Ben Percy's feet are firmly, unerringly on a path very few people ever see. I think he is going to have a wonderful career."
Peter Straub, New York Times-bestselling and Bram Stoker Award-winning Author of In the Night Room, Lost Boy, Lost Girl, Ghost Story, and Koko
"REFRESH, REFRESH is full of bravery and bravado, and it fairly crackles with life. These stories mark the beginning of what is bound to be a long and brilliant career for Benjamin Percy. Welcome him."
Ann Patchett, New York Times-bestselling and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Author of Truth and Beauty, Bel Canto, and The Magician's Assistant
"I admire the work of Benjamin Percy for its sheer ferocity and compassion, for its deep empathy for people at the hard edges of rage and grief and fear. The stories in Refresh, Refresh are big-hearted and drunk and dangerous, and there's a heightened, unnerving vibe as you travel through Percy's world. You never know where you will end up at the close of a Percy story, but you can be sure that he'll actually take you somewhere."
Dan Chaon, Author of Among the Missing and You Remind Me of Me
"Benjamin Percy is interested in grace, transcendence, the sudden moments in lives when a glow of feeling appears, brightens the chasm, goes dark again, or doesn't. He has a fabulous eye for detail, the names of things, weeds, weapons, machines, and renders superbly the revelatory shadings of character. In REFRESH, REFRESH he is unafraid of story, plot, and writes of plain lives in crisis without blinking, in sinewy, rippling prose, the rhythms of his sentences ever taking us more deeply inside."
Daniel Woodrell, Pen/West Award-winning Author of Tomato Red, Winter's Bone, and The Death of Sweet Mister
REVIEWS:
From Publishers Weekly:
Percy's second collection (following last year's The Language of Elk ) traces lives led in rural Oregon's fractured, mostly poor communities. The title story (selected for The Best American Short Stories 2006 ), presents Josh, a young man from small-town Tumalo who watches as men who signed up as Marine reservists for beer pay leave to fight in the Iraq War, including Josh's father. As Josh's unreliable first person details a deer hunt, the escapades of the town recruitment officer and the less-and-less frequent e-mails from his father, tension slowly builds. Set during a blackout, The Caves in Oregon follows geology teacher Becca and her husband, Kevin, as they explore a network of caves beneath their home, grappling to understand each other in the wake of a miscarriage. Meltdown imagines a nuclear disaster in November 2009, while the menacing Whisper opens with the accidental late-life death of Jacob, leaving his brother, Gerald, to care for Jacob's stroke-impaired wife. Percy's talent for putting surprising characters in difficult contemporary settings makes this a memorable collection.
From Booklist:
The title story in Percy's collection won the Plimpton and Pushcart prizes and was anthologized in Best American Short Stories of 2006, and justly so. In it, the small town of Tumalo, Oregon, loses its coaches, teachers, barbers, and cooks when the army deploys a batallion of part-time soldiers to Iraq. Two of the men's sons, still reeling from their fathers' departure, spend the time boxing as a way to alleviate stress, anxiously awaiting their fathers' communiqués by e-mail. The other stories, also set in rural Oregon at the foot of the Cascade Mountains, all carry a similar thread of emotional desperation. And that pain is inevitably mirrored in a threatening landscape, which here, in one viscerally rendered story after another, includes a mad bear, an eerie underground cave, and a dangerous hail storm. In one of the most boldly envisioned stories, "Meltdown," a nuclear accident has left Oregon a dead zone, unpopulated save for renegades like Darren. He drives down deserted, ash-covered streets because "living with ghosts feels more like a victory, somehow." These are hard-hitting stories from a writer to watch. Wilkinson, Joanne.
Click below to read reviews in the following periodicals: New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Boston Globe
The Oregonian
The Chicago Tribune
The London Times
The London Independent
Bookforum
The Capital Times
Omaha World-Herald
New West: The Voice of the Rocky Mountains
Christianity Today
The L Magazine
New Letters
Minnesota Monthly 
|
