Hibernate

by Elizabeth Eslami

Overview

Hibernate is a big-hearted and brutal story collection. In these globe-spanning stories, Elizabeth Eslami follows ordinary men and women who slowly awaken to hard choices. A fishing trip forces two Montana brothers to grow up in ways they never could have imagined. A Sudanese immigrant begins a new life with his girlfriend in America, only to find himself pulled toward his mother’s past transgressions. A group of tourists visits an Indian pueblo and realizes their tour guide isn’t at all who they expected. A shipwrecked captain and his men cling to the company of narwhals and Eskimos. And in the unforgettable title story, two lovers trade life as they’ve known it for an escape into the extraordinary. A masterful storyteller as likely to draw blood as to heal, Eslami moves her restless, resilient characters across an uneven landscape toward a hard earned place of peace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814251881
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2014
Series:	Ohio State Univ Prize in Short Fiction
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Eslami teaches in the MFA program at Manhattanville College and is a senior prose editor of Tupelo Quarterly. She is the author of the novel Bone Worship.

Table of Contents

Jocko Hollow 1

Muta Scale 13

Hibernators 22

New Year 28

Victory Forge 42

Sour Milk 49

Continuity in Filmmaking 67

Adwok, Pantokrator 75

MacArthur Park 88

The Yana Land 101

Everything Gets Mixed Together at the Pueblo 107

Acknowledgments 121

Editorial Reviews

Each of Eslami’s stories works on the reader like a solar eclipse. There is the same feeling of melancholy suspense, the expectation of something rare and beautiful, of being held both inside and outside of time. And then comes that brief moment when we are able to look fully at what would otherwise blind us, those things we do to each other in the name of love and anger and fear.” —Karen Palmer, author of All Saints and Border Dogs



“Using clean lines, Eslami cannily depicts the variety of human strangeness and longing. These stories are sage, vital, and addictive. More than that: they will pierce your heart.” —Elise Blackwell, author of An Unfinished Score and Hunger



“Oh, what a writer. Elizabeth Eslami continuously surprises and amazes. Hibernate is a collection of unique and astonishing stories.” — Marcy Dermansky, author of Bad Marie and Twins

From the Publisher

2014-05-01
Eslami's (Bone Worship, 2010) incisive story collection explores the shadowed corners of working-class lives.In each of these 11 tales, unsung men and women grapple with the detritus of the everyday; chance encounters and split decisions are catalysts for the years of discontent that follow. In the opening story "Jocko Hollow," two Montana boys' lives are upended the summer they find a stranger occupying their favorite fishing spot. An older sister meditates on her brother's zealous but seemingly deluded decision to join the Army in "Victory Forge." Themes range from innocence to adulthood and identity. Role reversal among younger and older generations abounds: Parents behave selfishly (and often cowardly), and their children adopt adult roles before their time. Deacon, "a whip-smart boy of the prairie" born in a trailer to drunken simpletons, contrives a sense of purpose by taking a housecleaning job to pay for college in "Sour Milk"; the eponymous hero of "Adwok, Pantokrator" deals with the fallout of his mother's alleged infidelities while facing the stark realities of immigration. In "Everything Gets Mixed Together at the Pueblo," a tour guide, exhausted by the facade she maintains for endless herds of tourists, begins to fall out of character. The narrator wryly notes that Kathy and Jennifer, the guides, "do not have names of birds, or seasons, or words separated by hyphens, and this is mildly disappointing to everybody." It's one of many moments in the collection that articulate a profound feeling of alienation—both among other cultures and within our own. The edges are neatly filled in by several dreamlike stories, including the surreal "Hibernators," wherein a young couple digs themselves a hole "where their love would bloom like the birth of a mole rat." These worlds, if bleak, are never less than perfectly honest; social stratification and race dissolve as the rich and poor, from every corner of the world, struggle to find anything worth holding on to. If they do, it often owes to a programmed instinct for survival—composed all the while in stark, unflinching prose.A searing array of stories envisioned through crystal-clear eyes.

Kirkus Reviews