Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

Fiction & Literature, Humorous, Short Stories, Literary
Cover of the book Some Trick: Thirteen Stories by Helen DeWitt, New Directions
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Author: Helen DeWitt ISBN: 9780811227834
Publisher: New Directions Publication: May 29, 2018
Imprint: New Directions Language: English
Author: Helen DeWitt
ISBN: 9780811227834
Publisher: New Directions
Publication: May 29, 2018
Imprint: New Directions
Language: English

NPR Best Book of the Year

New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults

At last a new book: a baker’s dozen of stories all with Helen DeWitt’s razor-sharp genius

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

NPR Best Book of the Year

New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults

At last a new book: a baker’s dozen of stories all with Helen DeWitt’s razor-sharp genius

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”

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