What He's Poised to Do: Stories

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What He's Poised to Do: Stories (eBook) Pub. Date: 6/15/2010 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
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What He's Poised to Do: Stories Pub. Date: 6/15/2010 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

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Overview

Ben Greenman is a writer of virtuosic range and uncanny emotional insight. As Darin Strauss has noted, "Like Bruno Schulz, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, and no one else I can think of, Greenman has the power to be whimsical without resorting to whimsy." The stories in this new collection, What He's Poised to Do, showcase his wide range, yet are united by a shared sense of yearning, a concern with connections missed and lost, and a poignant attention to how we try to preserve and maintain those connections through the written word.

From a portrait of an unfaithful man contemplating his own free will to the saga of a young Cuban man's quixotic devotion to a woman he may never have met; and from a nineteenth-century weapons inventor's letter to his young daughter to an aging man's wistful memory of a summer love affair in a law office—each of these stories demonstrates Greenman's maturity as a chronicler of romantic angst both contemporary and timeless, and as an explorer of the ways our yearning for connection informs our selves and our souls.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Fourteen very self-conscious stories from Greenman (Please Step Back) demonstrate the author's easy hand with formal manipulation, though his command over emotional terrain proves to be circumspect. The collection is bracketed by two very short stories (the title story and “Her Hand”) built around picture postcards (indeed, postmarks appear at the beginning of each story), and the varied stories between them all move with transparency; Greenman's prose is polished to a fine gloss that handily guides the reader along. While some stories only get a few details—two stories with cloyingly cute and very long titles are among the shortest; their titles virtual punch lines—others spin on, dominated less by substance than by stylistic demands, as with “Seventeen Different Ways to Get a Load of That,” which documents a relationship breakdown in short numbered cuts. The strongest story, “What We Believe We Cannot Praise,” about changing dynamics at a law firm, hints at Greenman's talent and begs for a longer treatment than it gets in this chilly if playful collection. (June)

New York Times Book Review

“Greenman offers quiet, serious stories lifted by occasional humor and linked by instances of written correspondence. ”

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Kirkus Reviews

More stories from the New Yorker editor and indie-lit notable. The title story follows a business traveler in the process of abandoning his wife and child, and it's written in a distinctly alienating-almost mechanical-tone. This work first appeared in a project of Greenman's called "Correspondences," which encompassed both a limited-edition book and a forum for reader participation. Whether or not that project was a success is outside the scope of this review, but, in the context of this collection, the story is a dud. A McSweeney's alum, Greenman is known for his willingness to experiment with form and style, and this is not the first time he has repurposed his own material (2003's Superworse was a revised version of 2001's Superbad). But too many of the stories here feel like exercises. "Barn," for example, seems to exist so that Greenman can mimic the voice of a Nebraska farmwife in 1962, and it has an ending, seemingly fraught with meaning and pathos, that's inconsequential. Some of the pieces merit the exuberant praise he has enjoyed in the past. "Against Samantha," the tale of a young man who might leave his fiancee if he wasn't so enamored of her mother, is a deep delight. It's set in 1928, and Greenman achieves an authentically upper-crust, vintage tone, and the anxiety his protagonist experiences provides a bracing dose of weirdness that keeps the proceedings from becoming precious. An uneven collection, unlikely to create a new audience for Greenman. Author tour to Boston, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and upon request

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061987403
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 6/15/2010
Pages: 170
Sales rank: 833,813
Series: P.S. Series
Product dimensions: 5.30 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Ben Greenman

Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and author of What He's Poised to Do, Please Step Back, Superbad, Superworse, and A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Opium, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

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