We Want What We Want - Couverture souple

Ohlin, Alix

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1487004893 ISBN 13 : 9781487004897

Editeur : Astoria, 2021

Synopsis

Thirteen glittering, surprising, and darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives, from two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Alix Ohlin.

In the mordantly funny “Money, Geography, Youth,” Vanessa arrives home from a gap year volunteering in Ghana to find that her father is engaged to her childhood best friend. Unable to reconcile the girl she went to dances with in the eighth grade and the woman in her father’s bed, Vanessa turns to a different old friendship for her own, unique diversion. In the subversive “The Brooks Brothers Guru,” Amanda drives to upstate New York to rescue her gawky cousin from a cult, only to discover clean-cut, well-dressed men living in a beautiful home, discussing the classics and drinking cocktails, moving her to wonder what freedoms she might be willing to trade for a life of such elegant comfort. And in “The Universal Particular,” Tamar welcomes her husband’s young stepcousin into her home, only to find her cool suburban life knocked askew in ways she cannot quite understand. 

Populated with imperfect families, burned potential, and inescapable old flames, the stories in We Want What We Want are, each one, diamond-sharp — sparkling with pain, humour, and beauty.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

ALIX OHLIN is the author of six books, including the novels Inside and Dual Citizens, which were both finalists for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and many other publications. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives in Vancouver, where she chairs the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

from THE BROOKS BROTHERS GURU

John Lorimer wants to be friends on Facebook.

Amanda isn’t sure whether to accept. It’s a long night like any other, her bedroom blue-lit by devices, laptop and phone and iPad scattered on the comforter, earbuds nestled as she listens to Songwriters/Folk on Pandora; this is how she goes to sleep. She has three or four windows open on the computer; she’s watching a movie and reading reviews of it at the same time.

They have zero mutual friends.

In his profile picture, John stands, left knee bent, hands on hips, on a rock rising jaggedly from the ocean like a broken tooth. His short haircut looks military, his posture commendably rigid. He smiles like he’s never been happier. Amanda’s own picture shows a cartoon cat with its back rounded, fur up. She doesn’t like to give too much away. In John’s square jaw and dark brown hair she can barely make out traces of the gawky cousin she last saw — when, exactly? It would have been that summer in Virginia, when they were sixteen, both of their mothers sucking down gin-and-tonics as if alcohol were oxygen — years ago. Then John’s mother died, then hers, sisters so close they succumbed to the same disease within a year. The funerals were blurred and washy to her; when she tries to remember them, she can summon only feverish sweat and a churn in her stomach, no visuals at all.

Now she spends summer vacations with her father’s family in Delaware, those cheerful extended relatives with healthy genetic history and aged grandmothers and aunts, a family where nobody knows what BRCA stands for, where nobody has been getting yearly mammograms since they were twenty.

She doesn’t think they look alike. She confirms his request.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Astoria
• Date d'édition: 2021
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1487004893
• ISBN 13: 9781487004897
• Reliure: Paperback
• Nombre de pages: 256
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible