Reptile House (American Reader), by Robin McLean
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Reptile House (American Reader), by Robin McLean
Free PDF Ebook Reptile House (American Reader), by Robin McLean
The characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, dream of weddings, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Robin McLean's stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us.
Robin McLean holds an MFA from UMass Amherst. She teaches at Clark University and lives in Bristol, New Hampshire, and Sunderland, Massachusetts.
Reptile House (American Reader), by Robin McLean - Amazon Sales Rank: #1273463 in Books
- Brand: Mclean, Robin
- Published on: 2015-05-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.90" h x .70" w x 5.20" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 216 pages
Reptile House (American Reader), by Robin McLean Review A Paris Review Best Book of 2015“Robin McLean writes in wonderful cascades of language. Her characters are carried along by those cascades, often unwittingly. Sometimes, as with the two young men in 'No Name Creek,' they are carried to a happy end. More often, they seem to be, like Lilibeth in 'Cold Snap,' overtaken by events beyond their control. Characters’ own words, often inept or pathetic in light of their situations, offer ironic counterpoint. Much is laughable in these stories. Don’t be deceived. Through her sly wit and humor, Robin McLean is luring readers into deeper questions.” —Frank Soos“Tonally and structurally, these marvelous stories have no discernable influences. In her debut collection, Robin McLean emerges as a writer with a singular voice and vision. I admire this book immoderately, and I hope that readers will find it.” —Chris Bachelder“Robin McLean's fiction is harrowing and wry and compassionate, and always both fiercely rooted in the world and fearlessly willing to take chances. I love her keen sense of our inherent strangeness, and her heartening sense of just how important it is that we never stop trying to close the gap between who are and who we aspire to be. —Jim Shepard"Once you’ve read these nine stories, forgetting them is as unlikely as discovering the end-point of pi. Kissing cousins to George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, and perhaps even Don DeLillo, they are nonetheless powered by a distinctive new voice. McLean dives fearlessly through the Looking Glass; she scrubs the psyche raw, perhaps in an effort to get even closer to what constitutes 'reality'." —Jim Story, author of Problems in Translation"Robin McLean's debut collection is electric. I recommend that you get a copy and put it at the top of your stack." —Jodi Angel, author of You Only Get Letters From Jail"Reptile House is so wonderful. It's full of (almost) unbearable tension and what a wild ride through so many worlds. I enjoyed reading it hugely and am recommending it to all my reading/writing friends." —Kathy Anderson, author of Next Door Gay-bors and Front Row Seat"When you read Robin McLean's stories, she's gonna get you. She will take you out into deep, and then deeper, water." —Noy Holland, author of Spectacle of the Body, Swim for the Little on First, and Bird: A Novel"I haven't read a book this dark and frank and sublimely written in a while. Maybe since Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men." —Alden Jones, author of Unaccompanied Minors and The Blind Masseuse"McLean’s debut collection of short stories moves seamlessly from adultery to kidnapping, from assassination plots to extreme geothermal events, all in a voice that is spare and darkly poetic. . . . McLean’s characters are lonely in their marriages, isolated from the world around them, and not generally given happy endings. What this book does offer, however, is strangely realistic glimpses into conflicts that are equal parts surreal and hyper-realistic, rendered by a voice that gracefully juxtaposes terse reportage and lyrical insight. The result is a taut volume that explores the fate of the dashed dreamer, offering charming insights into the untidy worlds of people who are not where they thought they’d be." —Publishers Weekly"I am still thinking about these stories, still turning those objects over in my head like the strange but stunning artifacts of someone else’s life. And that, I suppose, is Reptile House’s most impressive accomplishment: for better or worse, it is the kind of book that stays with you long after you’ve finished it, begging to be revisited over and over again." —Colorado Review"Upset runs rampant throughout McLean’s debut work. McLean’s surreal tales about ordinary characters deliver emotional truth in poetic language. Concrete and surreal, they spill beyond the conventional short story forms.” —Common
About the Author Robin McLean: Robin McLean was a lawyer and then a potter for 15 years in the woods of Alaska before receiving her MFA at UMass Amherst in Massachusetts. Her first collection Reptile House was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Prize in 2011 and 2012. McLean’s stories appear widely in such places as The Nashville Review, The Malahat Review, Gargoyle, and The Common and Copper Nickel, as well as the anthology American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers. A figure skater first—having learned to skate and walk at the same time—McLean believes that crashing on ice prepared her for writing fiction. She currently teaches at Clark University, and splits her time between Newfound Lake in Bristol, New Hampshire, and a 200-year-old farm in western Massachusetts.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Brilliantly written By Stephen T. Refreshingly, these stories are not handed to you. You will exercise not only your imagination, but your ability and willingness to understand and accept the realities of the human spirit. You'll have to, and want to, think about what the hell you just read! You'll be left wanting more, even just one more sentence to put a nice bow around it. But that's the allure of these stories. They are elegant in their setup and execution, and also beautifully relentless. She wants you to think. You need to work for these stories, but it's worth the effort.Looking forward to more from this author.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Triumphant By Rob McLean There is a cumulative effect in the first story in Cold snap (the opening story) of short sentences, like the killing effect of slow, relentless punches of heavy fists, none of them looking for a knockout. All of them part of a larger, deadly piece. I spent the second half of the story praying the main character would speak to no one, or rather that no one would speak back to her because it would mean I'd guessed wrong but also because I had this rising sense of a beautiful isolation. "Hello, hello?" The question echoes through the story as you read it, and afterwards at night.I don't know that the story means anything as much as it describes, obliquely, an interior landscape. You're left with the intuition that it’s a painting rather than a photograph. "Hello, hello?" I couldn't tell if Lilibeth, the only character in the story, wanted anyone to answer, if she was calling out just to hear herself making an effort, or if she was calling out to assure herself that she was alone. Like when you want to be alone in a house. Like when you _really_ want to be alone in the house.There is a differentiation of sexes in Cold Snap, but a fierce equality that skips genders. This is a woman transformed, made terrible by application and endeavor who grows in size and stature and audacity. Who discovers some secret that translates to power and self-realization. Strangely, this story of total destruction doesn't strike me as apocalyptic. It's reverse global warming, it's a tsunami that unfolds at glacial speed. It's a catastrophe that takes place at a pace that can be described in deliberate, suspenseful narrative. Which is perhaps why the world can't take global warming seriously (too slow to see) and is baffled by the unimaginable power of a tsunami or an earthquake (they're too sharp and fast). When things get cold, there's time for the town council to pass resolutions and for them to be subsequently recognized as absurd. When the absurdity of the town's position becomes obvious, belief and hope are gone and Lilibeth is left in a ghost town. Maybe the point of apocalypses is that they seem beyond our comprehension.Cold snap acts as a welcome mat into the author’s interior world. It’s a statement of what can happen within the confines of a story, the expanse that’s possible and the brutality that’s out there. They are stories that need to be etched into your brain, one reading at a time. Take a maximum of one per day. They are stories that have been chiseled from stone. They are flashlight beams illuminating an enormous, dark cave as you walk through it. You touch and admire the walls and the dripping stalactites -- but it’s the emptiness and the space that you feel and wonder at.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. ... collection of stories that is intended to make you comfortable - and it's not intended to make you uncomfortable ... By Out of a Jam Solutions This isn't a collection of stories that is intended to make you comfortable - and it's not intended to make you uncomfortable either. Unlike many authors interested in exploring the human condition, the author isn't out to shock, comfort, or disturb. Instead, this is a rare exploration of how humans tick - the dark, the light, the glorious, and the absurd that exists in every one of us. If you have preconceptions about good and bad, this book may not be of you. If you want to get into the heads of real people you never understood, but always knew, then you owe it to yourself to pick this book up.
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