"Haunting. . . . Wonderfully strange and eerie, Intimations outlines
the confusion, loss, and anxieties that underlie the different stages of
mortality, forcing us to re-examine the often unsettling realities of
our existence." -- Buzzfeed
"Brilliantly alive. . . . the world is parsed with a charming
exactitude that magnifies all its latent marvels and especially
horrors--the blacker and more peculiar these stories get, the funnier
they are." -- New York Times Book Review
From the celebrated author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, a
thought-provoking, often unsettling story collection that consists,
broadly, of narrative diagrams of the three main stages in a human life:
birth, life, and death.
Alexandra Kleeman's debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and
Tom Perrotta. It was praised by the New York Times as "a powerful
allegory of our civilization's many maladies, artfully and elegantly
articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation."
In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly
seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning
to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and
confusing period of "living" where we understand what is expected of us
and struggle to do it; and the death-y period toward the end where we
sense it is ending and will end only partially understood, at best.
The title is taken from one of the stories ("Intimation"), but is also a
play on Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality"--only in this case
it's not clear exactly what is being intimated, but it's nothing so
gleaming and good as Immortality. The middle, "Living" section of the
book, is fleshed out with a set of stories that borrow more from
traditional realist fiction to illustrate the inner lives of the
characters.
At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance
as its characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An
unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the
disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the
art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving
a house-party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real
blood.
Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, Intimations is an utterly
transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant
young writers.
