Are You Here For What I'm Here For?

by Brian Booker

Overview

“A brilliant debut.” —CHARLES BAXTER, author of The Soul Thief and There’s Something I Want You to Do

The suspense creeps in and takes hold in seven stories about troubled characters grappling with rare illnesses, menacing chance encounters, sexual awakening, impending natural disasters, and New Age cults.

Within these pages, the everyday meets the uncanny as two high school friends go out for one unforgettable night. A boy, haunted by dreams of a catastrophic flood, becomes swept up in an encephalitis epidemic. A hypochondriac awaits her diagnosis at a Caribbean health resort. A disease researcher meets his nemesis on a train. A father searches for his missing son in a remote mountain lodge where nothing is quite as it seems. An elderly pharmacist protects his adopted nephew, who found a mermaid in a bottle, from a coastal village gripped by hysteria. A teenager is sent to a “therapeutic” boarding school with disturbing methods and is reunited with a staff member years later.

Even at its most surreal, this polished and lyrical debut remains grounded in the emotional lives of people teetering atop widening chasms of confusion and doubt.

Brian Booker’s stories have been published in the New England Review, Conjunctions, One Story, Tin House, Vice, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from New York University, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. Are You Here For What I’m Here For? is his first collection of fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942658139
Publisher:	Bellevue Literary Press
Publication date:	04/18/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Brian Booker holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow, and a PhD in English from New York University. His stories have been published in the Antioch Review, Conjunctions, Epoch, New England Review, One Story, Shenandoah, Tin House, TriQuarterly, Vice, and other journals and magazines. He has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. Are You Here For What I’m Here For? is his first collection of fiction.

Table of Contents

Brace for Impact 13

A Drowning Accident 36

Are You Here For What I'm Here For? 64

The Sleeping Sickness 102

Here to Watch Over Me 139

Gumbo Limbo 179

Love Trip 206

Editorial Reviews

03/21/2016
In his first collection of short stories, Booker intricately captures the atmosphere and emotions of a solitary and surreal existence. The characters here are tormented by their pasts and haunted by their often bleak futures. Most of these seven pieces follow a theme of sickness of some kind. In “A Drowning Accident,” the child narrator is caught in the middle of an encephalitis epidemic; in “Are You Here For What I’m Here For?” a hypochondriac woman faces her fears at a remote resort; and in “Brace for Impact”—the book’s most foreboding and perhaps best piece—the teenage narrator finds himself in a strange house inhabited by a sexy classmate and her invalid mother. “The Sleeping Sickness” proves that nothing is ever as it seems, and “Here to Watch over Me” is the heartbreaking story of father searching for his son in more ways than one. Only the mermaid tale “Gumbo Limbo” falters. With a keen eye for detail, Booker announces himself as a premier storyteller whose work crosses genre boundaries, appealing to fans of mystery, suspense, and literary fiction. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Booker’s writing is raw, haunting, and otherworldly in the pursuit of his characters’ emotional lives. . . . I loved the diversity of this collection—there is a hypochondriac, a paranoid academic, a teenager coming into his sexuality, and a boy who finds a mermaid on the beach. I’m here for Booker’s beautiful, brilliant debut.” —Paris Review

“Delivers seven compelling vignettes that tell different stories but are seamlessly threaded by a common factor: illness. Each individually titled vignette showcases the lyrical and phantasmagorical voice that Booker uses to colorfully display each character and their sometimes real and sometimes imagined affliction.” —Time Out New York

“Unrelenting in its exploration of what we can know about ourselves, Are You Here For What I’m Here For? is an enchanting journey that lingers with its reader long after the last page.” —One Story

“[Booker] has a markedly arresting storytelling style in this debut collection.” —Toronto Star

“Outstanding. . . . Are You Here For What I’m Here For? rings with memorable characters, scenes, and settings. Brian Booker’s magical realism reminds me of “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez—rich with melancholic truths and mystery.” —New Pages

“Excellent. . . . Booker has a way of catching the nuances of the American psyche. The writing is crisp; the characters are believable.” —Lambda Literary

“Elegant and inventive. . . . Ambiguity fuels Booker’s work, and it’s what makes his short stories worth reading over and over again. Every time I open this book, I find something new.” —Rumpus

“The title of the collection perfectly captures the anxiety of constant searching for: understanding, solutions, or a safe space. . . . The inner monologues are relatable and juicy. Our narrators aren’t smoke and dagger types, rather they are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, ordinary people just moving through life. . . . None of these personas are superheroes or mad scientists, though their limitations are illuminating.” —EDGE Media Network

“It’s hard to find [a story] so original, so dead-on in its prose, so engaging, I sped my way through its thirty-something pages, completely entranced by Booker’s writing, imagination, and execution.” —Story366

“This book has some real high moments . . . impressive imagery and diverse characters.” —Cultured Vultures

“With a keen eye for detail, Booker announces himself as a premier storyteller whose work crosses genre boundaries, appealing to fans of mystery, suspense, and literary fiction.” —Publishers Weekly

“Brian Booker’s stories contain a phantasmagorical hilarity, along with a headlong momentum that only accelerates as the stories’ events grow more dire. You can open this book to any page and will find there amazing events related in a deeply unsettling style. I don’t know of any writing quite like his. Are You Here For What I’m Here For? is a brilliant debut.” —CHARLES BAXTER, author of The Soul Thief and There’s Something I Want You to Do

“Brian Booker’s stories are contagiously readable. Like many of the maladies they so vividly describe, they seem at once believable and otherworldly, casting the spell of an uncanny fever dream. But while the characters in these tales may languish, their reader—braced by Booker’s delightfully unsettling imagination—emerges always invigorated.” —MICHAEL LOWENTHAL, author of Charity Girl and The Paternity Test

“Reading Brian Booker’s stories is like lolling on your sofa, or strolling the streets of your town, when you look around and it dawns on you that everything you thought you recognized is suddenly . . . different. The unnerving newspaper headline, those weird jars in the fridge, the off-kilter conversation with that too friendly stranger—the quotidian and the unremarkable are rendered strange and new, and the effect is, to quote the author, ‘a little like nectar and a little like poison.’ These are terrific stories, and Booker is a terrific writer.” —DANIEL OROZCO, author of Orientation

“An unforgettable collection of people trying to learn how—and whether—to trust their own minds. Booker’s theme, like that of Kafka and W.G. Sebald, is dislocation, as much from the physical world as from the world of others and of thought. The writing brims with intelligent detail, but always in the service of its characters—people striving for ‘new, uncharted places,’ reachable nowhere else but in these singular stories.” —SALVATORE SCIBONA, author of The End

“Brian Booker is a realist the way Kafka or Ishiguro are realists—he works at the seams of our experience, in those anxious moments where we cannot be sure of our senses, our memories, or our selves. In these extraordinary and uncanny stories, anxiety, neurosis, disease, and hallucination overtake his characters and haunt the worlds they inhabit. Are You Here For What I’m Here For? teems with unsettling wisdom about all those things our minds and hearts contain that we wish they did not.” —CASEY WALKER, author of Last Days in Shanghai

From the Publisher

2016-03-03
Seven phantasmagorical stories from debut author Booker. Altered perceptions are the cornerstone of this collection of stories. "Brace for Impact" explores the inner life of a boy who has a transformative experience in his youth talking to a woman who said she'd been in a plane crash. "I wasn't sure if I believed in her," he thinks. "But in years afterward, whenever the bad turbulence hit, miles above Wyoming, or off the coast of Newfoundland, I'd feel the floor drop, hear bolts wrenched, the ripping of metal, a calamity of noise and wind, and think, now it gets real: and if you could surrender to that, how terribly fear, infinitely precious fear, would fall away: and that's what it would be like to be seen by God." A boy falls very ill in "A Drowning Accident" and can't be sure what's real and what's imagined. Illness haunts a hypochondriac in "Are You Here for What I'm Here For?" "It was a kind of spiritual camouflage: you disguised yourself in a cloak of misfortune to trick fate into passing you over," he writes. "It was a kind of dark magic performed in the corner of your heart. It was vaguely shameful, and Gina knew better. But you stuck with what seemed to work." Sickness also runs amok in "The Sleeping Sickness," which finds a physician exploring a landscape transformed. In "Here to Watch Over Me," a man searches for his missing son in a remote lodge that might as well be in the same chain as the Hotel California. The book finally descends into full-on psychedelia in "Gumbo Limbo," a myth about a coastal village in hysterics. But it wraps up with "Love Trip," a nostalgic if slightly bent tale of a boarding school and the trials of childhood. Carefully curated and slightly delicate tales of pedestrian terror.

Kirkus Reviews