The Man in the Banana Trees

by Marguerite Sheffer

Overview

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection 2025, Finalist
A Debutiful “Most Anticipated Debut Book of 2024”
One of Electric Literature’s Most Exciting Debut Short Story Collection of 2024 
Named a Best Book of 2024 by Debutiful and Electric Literature

The stories in The Man in the Banana Trees take place in the past, present, and future—from the American Gulf South to the orbit around Jupiter. We meet teachers and students, ghosts and aliens. An ice cream consultant in the year 2036 predicts a devastating flavor trend and a disgruntled New England waiter investigates a mysterious tanker crash. Although wildly varied in setting, length, and genre, a thread of the fantastic unites these stories, as characters struggle to understand that thing lurking at the edge of their perception: something sinister, or maybe—miraculous.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609389956
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	11/05/2024
Series:	Iowa Short Fiction Award Series
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Marguerite Sheffer teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction at Tulane University, and is a founding member of Third Lantern Lit, a local writing collective, and the Nautilus and Wildcat Writing Groups. Sheffer lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.
 

Editorial Reviews

The Man in the Banana Trees kicks ass. Every story is a surprise. The dexterity of Marguerite Sheffer’s prose is absolutely awe-inspiring. By turns heartbreaking and brilliant, Sheffer’s stories remind one of George Saunders and Amy Hempel in their playfulness and through their special eye for tragedy.”—Jamil Jan Kochai, judge, Iowa Short Fiction Award
 

“The Man in the Banana Trees is a truly remarkable work of literary art and marks the arrival of an absolutely brilliant new storyteller. Marguerite Sheffer is an endlessly inventive writer, but she’s also a philosopher capable of drawing metaphor and meaning from the lives of ordinary people trapped in extraordinary circumstances. Following the path of acclaimed writers like Borges, Márquez, Link, Machado, and Keegan, Sheffer promises to provide remarkable stories for many years to come.”—Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author, The American Daughters
 

“A collection that writes its own miraculous language for the meaning of art and the question of our moral obligation to others. The range here dazzles—a contemporary ballet stage, a nineteenth-century artists’ colony, a ship full of ghosts, a life stalked by grief in the form of a virtual-reality tiger—and all these pictures are knit into a single breathtaking view by a sensibility that’s both empathetic and unyieldingly keen. The Man in the Banana Trees is a blaze of light, brilliant enough to illuminate not only its characters’ interior lives but also the reader’s own.”—Clare Beams, author, The Garden
 

“Rarely have I come across ideas as original, prose as exquisite, and hearts as bared on the page as those found in this collection. I am blown away by its achievement. Marguerite Sheffer is extraordinary.”—Julia Phillips, author, Bear
 

“Haunting and hilarious, horrifying and heartwarming, this is short story gold. Marguerite Sheffer is the alchemist, reimagining and transmuting the form.”—John Vercher, author, Devil is Fine
 

“The Man in the Banana Trees is magnificent. Marguerite Sheffer entrances with stories that are strange, unexpected, and full of imaginative magic. These stories are unbound by time, leaping from a romantically and intellectually entangled trio of researchers in 1960s England who discover the first pulsars to a commodore in purgatory, forced to view his descendants from the belly of his ship. By slanting our reality, Sheffer’s stories ask us to glance anew at our world. Brimming with life, love, loss, and longing.”—Crystal Hana Kim, author, The Stone Home
 

“The unique blend of stories in Sheffer’s collection gives new insight into our world. She uses genre and setting to explore the unfamiliar and push readers into using a mirror to see our reality in them. I never knew what to expect from story to story. Sheffer kept me on my toes and each story felt like the story of the collection. She outdid herself time and time again.”—Adam Vitcavage, a Debutiful “Most Anticipated Debut Book of 2024”

“I loved [all of these] stories. Sheffer is a brilliant and truly original writer with such a unique sensibility. . . . I intend to read everything she writes from now on. . . . I promise you’ll fall in love with these astonishing stories, too.”—Noreen Tomassi

From the Publisher

Combining fantasy, history, futurism, and contemporaneity, The Man in the Banana Trees is a mesmerizing and eclectic short story collection that experiments with fabrication, discovery, and human nature.

Foreword Reviews

Sheffer moves between time periods and genres with aplomb, exhibiting variety and verve. Her final paragraphs and lines, in particular, are killer. This terrific collection should attract fans of Megan Mayhew Bergman, Alexandra Chang, and Louisa Hall.

Shelf Awareness

Here you’ll find the odd and the beautiful, the fantastic and the provocative, a true assemblage of curiosities bound together with sharp sentences and ferocious intelligence. Perhaps only the banal everydayness of the world is missing. There are ghost stories (an artist who just can’t give up on her dreams of grandeur), science fiction imaginings (ice cream obsessions run amok in the year 2036), and countless other experiments in genre and ideas. What holds these stories together is a core human striving to survive, to understand, and to be happy, even in the strangest of times.”—Electric Literature

Electric Literature