Anything You Recognize: Stories

by Daniel Mueller

ANYTHING YOU RECOGNIZE is the exuberant new collection from the acclaimed author of Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey and How Animals Mate . In Mueller’s latest, the central cycle of stories follows an upwardly mobile family navigating the late ‘60s in west Texas, with an adventurous young boy coming face to face with the era’s newly blurred lines around sex, race and family. From an inexhaustible storehouse of period details, Mueller sets the unbridled freedoms of bike-riding boyhood against the subtle and not-so-subtle pressures of newly liberated adults — and then adds several stories set years later, including a dreamy backpacker’s hilarious fantasies of his would-be girlfriend to scenes from a circle of aging gay artists, reminders of the ever-shifting boundaries we all still face. Daniel Mueller is the grateful recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, University of Virginia, Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Sewanee Writers' Conference. Mueller teaches on the creative writing faculties of the University of New Mexico, Low-Residency MFA Program at Queens University of Charlotte, and Tinker Mountain Writers' Workshop.

234 pages, Paperback

Published September 19, 2023

Reviews

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant collection. Humor, yearning, big questions, little questions, humanity. Daniel Mueller is a short story writer par excellence.

*I was gifted an advanced copy, hence the early read date.

[Ginger Pinholster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniel Mueller’s riveting short story collection serves as a masterclass on how to write well, with authority, precision, and conviction. The author’s mastery of language is unfailingly vivid and evocative. He writes, for example, that “built into every home was an incinerator,” to launch a story about the tragic, haunting way a young boy disposes of a cherished friendship. Later in the collection, Mueller opens the tale of a young man’s chaotic, aspiring romance in Tulum by noting that “a padlock hung from the plum-colored door like a nose ring.” In the collection’s title piece, “Anything You Recognize,” the narrator and his slightly older love interest are careening through the Yucatan jungle with a probably-corrupt and unhinged police detective when Mueller unleashes this line: “We could’ve turned and run, Mandy in her flip-flops, me in my leather huaraches, both of us in our still-damp swimsuits, but if Noriega meant to kill us it made little difference whether we were moving targets or stationary ones.” The whole work pulses with action, often with innocence in peril. The writing remains incandescent from start to finish; Mueller renders a searing snapshot of 1960s American suburbia, full of false hope and hypocrisy. Much like Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” which the author evokes, this delightfully surprising coming-of-age montage will leave the reader wondering about the meaning of existence and the nature of freedom.

[Dawn Sperber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learn more about the writing craft each time I read Daniel Mueller’s books. The stories in Anything You Recognize address thorny moral issues and emotionally complex moments of characters reckoning with identity, yet his writing still makes me chuckle out loud here and there while I read, because the sentences and plot organizations are so cleverly constructed. Again and again, his writing’s poetic eye and compression are able to convey the ineffable ache of beautiful/ugly reality. The effect is stunning. This is a book to study and savor.

[Robin Haase · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection like no other. This book has humor and nostalgia. A must-read for anyone wanting to go down memory lane.

[Tim DeMarco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of these short stories are centered around boyhood in the late ‘60s. They examine sex and sexuality, race, family, and what “home” means.