Full name: Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

Author: Helen DeWitt Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Short Stories, Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780811227827 0811227820

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." Similar books: A Stranger in This World by Kevin Canty The Whore's Child by Richard Russo Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith The Watch by Rick Bass Assorted Fire Events by David Means Tooth and Claw by T. Coraghessan Boyle Because They Wanted to by Mary Gaitskill Short Cuts by Raymond Carver Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones The Pacific and Other Stories by Mark Helprin AM/PM by Amelia Gray If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie Birds of America by Lorrie Moore Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau