Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This engrossing first story collection by rising star Brendan Mathews is packed with compelling tales such as "My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer," in which a love triangle complicates things between a lion tamer, a trapeze artist, and the strongman. Mathews effortlessly weaves irresistible stories from a wide array of situations, as in "Airborne," in which a couple's obsession with a mold in their house causes them to tear it apart plank by plank.
A worker in architectural salvage trying to two-time his boss by stealing a valuable antique, a father and his sons haggling over the family business during high-stakes rounds of golf, and a widow of the Bosnian conflict recalling her husband's demise and her dramatic escape are only a few of the warm and intimately revealed characters populating Mathews's enchanting collection.
This Is Not a Love Song is proof positive that Mathews is every bit the expert minimalist that he was the boisterous maximalist, as each of these ten stories brings its world and its sympathetic characters to life with vivid detail, emotional precision, and winning humor.
Synopsis
A debut collection of moving and darkly witty stories from an "admirably fearless" (New York Times Book Review) writer whom critics have compared to Michael Chabon, E.L. Doctorow, and Dennis Lehane
A Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read" Selection
When marriages, friendships, and families come undone, to what lengths do we go to keep it all together? That question lies at the heart of Brendan Mathews's buoyant and unforgettable debut story collection. A young mother watches as her desperate husband, convinced a hidden poison lurks inside their walls, tears their home apart. Two journalists bruised by romance and revolution, one a survivor of the Bosnian war, trade tales of lost lovers. A father and his sons haggle over the family business during a high-stakes round of golf. And a lovesick circus clown tries to explain the accidents that bound him to a trapeze artist and a witless lion tamer.
If Mathews's novel The World of Tomorrow was an "outsized" entertainment, a "big, expressive debut" (Wall Street Journal), then This Is Not a Love Song, two stories from which have been included in The Best American Short Stories, is glorious proof that he excels equally as a miniaturist. From rock-star flameouts to church burnings to ordinary people trying not to fall out of love, these stories are packed with vivid detail, emotional precision, and deft, redemptive humor.