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Are You Here For What I'm Here For?
“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.
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.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published May 10, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 16, 2016
Are You Here For What I'm Here For? by Brian Booker is a very highly recommended exceptional collection of seven stories. With an acute eye for detail, intelligent presentations, and an accomplished style, Booker delivers thoughtful selections that will be appreciated by short story aficionados. Several of these stories deal with sickness, contain a sense of foreboding, mention natural disasters, and the trials of childhood. They all explore the emotional lives of fragile people.
Contents:
Brace for Impact: A teenage boy visits a girl's house with a friend, and has an encounter with her mother, who survived a plane crash.
A Drowning Accident: During an encephalitis epidemic in a small town, a boy talks to a tramp about his book of lucky numbers based on what you dream.
Are You Here for What I’m Here For?: "It was 1985 and there were two possibilities: Gina Maisley was dying, or Gina Maisley was not dying." Gina and her husband visit a health resort.
The Sleeping Sickness: Nothing is as it seems when a disease researcher takes a train trip.
Here to Watch Over Me: A father heads up to a mountain cabin to look for his son.
Gumbo Limbo: A young blind boy finds a friend, a sea creature, and is allowed to save/keep it in a bottle.
Love Trip: A teenager is sent to a therapeutic boarding school that follows dubious practices.
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Bellevue Literary Press for review purposes.
http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/2...
Contents:
Brace for Impact: A teenage boy visits a girl's house with a friend, and has an encounter with her mother, who survived a plane crash.
A Drowning Accident: During an encephalitis epidemic in a small town, a boy talks to a tramp about his book of lucky numbers based on what you dream.
Are You Here for What I’m Here For?: "It was 1985 and there were two possibilities: Gina Maisley was dying, or Gina Maisley was not dying." Gina and her husband visit a health resort.
The Sleeping Sickness: Nothing is as it seems when a disease researcher takes a train trip.
Here to Watch Over Me: A father heads up to a mountain cabin to look for his son.
Gumbo Limbo: A young blind boy finds a friend, a sea creature, and is allowed to save/keep it in a bottle.
Love Trip: A teenager is sent to a therapeutic boarding school that follows dubious practices.
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Bellevue Literary Press for review purposes.
http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/2...
February 21, 2017
Are You Here for What I'm Here For?
by Brian Booker
reviewed by Sharyn Wolf
This is a is riveting, peculiar, dimension-shattering and all together splendid book of short stories. I was reminded of the opening scene in “Un Chien Andalou” where the eyeball is slit. Or, maybe falling through a black hole into an altered world that bends the time and space between the coffin, the earth and the heavens.
Characters are simultaneously living and dying and born and reborn in a tangled, eerie continuum. Truth shifts on the spin of a dime. The unsexy becomes achingly erotic as in an early story where a young virgin has his band aid slowly, slowly removed by a creepy, much older woman in a wheelchair. I felt like I was witnessing a striptease as foreplay.
I want to applaud this masterful literature, written by an author who makes his own rules. Wildly inventive, even preposterous, the stories feel true. The formality of style elevates the work, making it feel timeless—so much so that I checked the pub date, even as I knew the book just came out.
https://www.amazon.com/…/19426…/ref=c...…
by Brian Booker
reviewed by Sharyn Wolf
This is a is riveting, peculiar, dimension-shattering and all together splendid book of short stories. I was reminded of the opening scene in “Un Chien Andalou” where the eyeball is slit. Or, maybe falling through a black hole into an altered world that bends the time and space between the coffin, the earth and the heavens.
Characters are simultaneously living and dying and born and reborn in a tangled, eerie continuum. Truth shifts on the spin of a dime. The unsexy becomes achingly erotic as in an early story where a young virgin has his band aid slowly, slowly removed by a creepy, much older woman in a wheelchair. I felt like I was witnessing a striptease as foreplay.
I want to applaud this masterful literature, written by an author who makes his own rules. Wildly inventive, even preposterous, the stories feel true. The formality of style elevates the work, making it feel timeless—so much so that I checked the pub date, even as I knew the book just came out.
https://www.amazon.com/…/19426…/ref=c...…
April 25, 2016
We are the sum of our experiences. How we internalize them determine our thoughts, emotions and ultimate responses. It is a nonlinear abstract process that is not fully digested on a conscious level. Booker pays homage to this elusive cognitive concept through his cast of troubled characters. Their hallucinatory thoughts and situations illustrate the surreal functionality of the brain. It is an haunting display of extraordinary imagery that is as unpredictable as life itself. This was a thoughtful and unique debut novel.
June 13, 2016
Seven weirdly wonderful stories with characters grappling with the darkest of monsters... those that arise from the inner world of the mind. Unsettling, to say the least, this is not for everyone. But those who venture in will find surreal scenes that refuse not only to leave, but insist upon stirring dark currents in their own minds. There's humor here, and a strong thread of love for the strange creatures we are. A good read. The question is, do you dare? It's hard to stick a toe in without finding yourself suddenly submerged.
December 30, 2016
Really good and weirdly creepy. I kept expecting things to happen in each story -- they find the boy who ran away from the hospital on the drive to the desert ("Love Trip") or a connection is drawn between Oona LeMur and the creature ("Gumbo Limbo") -- and it doesn't. And that's a good thing.
November 12, 2022
A re-read. Original review posted on my blog.
Odd but atmospheric. I don't know if that combination works but that is the feeling that I felt while reading each story from this debut short story collection by Brian Booker. Well, sometimes, weird combinations can produce amazing results. And I believe, that's what happened with this book.
The author introduces characters that are flawed, troubled at most. There's depression, illness, bad dreams, paranoia, delusion, isolation, trials and folkloric superstitions. There's this teenage boy trying to lose his virginity who met the mother of his friend who survived a plane crash, a boy who contracted encephalitis caused by an epidemic that swept his town is being haunted by dreams of a catastrophic flood, a husband and wife visiting a tropical health resort with the fear that the wife might be dying from an illness, a disease researcher meeting an uncanny nemesis on his way home, a father looking for his missing son in a remote mountain cabin where everything seems distant from what they seem to be as before, an old pharmacist from a coastal village who has to protect his blind nephew who found a mermaid from village folks and a teenager who was sent to an eerie therapeutic boarding school.
The seven stories in this collection revolve around (untrustworthy) characters full of doubts and confusion. The stories were a mix of realism and magical realism hanging readers on a dream like mood. I have to question if the things they are facing are real or were just crafted by their minds. It's like I always have to decipher and navigate the minds of the characters to have a good understanding of what they are facing. This book made me think and analyze every story and situation to have a clearer picture of each piece. This is not mentally-grueling as it may appear from how I described it but the reader must just be in the right mood while reading it. For me, I advised to have this book read in one sitting. A momentum must be set and it must not be broken. Based on my experience while reading this book, I had a hard time getting back to this book after putting it down for quite some time for this book requires a certain atmosphere to be enjoyed. Much of like doing a meditation.
Each story in this book is meant to be savored. The book has a slow pacing and I believe it worked to its advantage. This book is not for everyone and it gets some time before it becomes totally immersive. There's that suspense that creeps with every page though the stories are far from being creepy. Some of the stories were so detached from the real world which will make you doubtful. The author has a way with words that after finishing each story, I was left longing for more. There was like a void that was left within me that needed to be filled up.
Overall, this book was a detailed and unique collection, full of depth with peculiar and inventive writing. It's a thought-provoking read about human's ability to respond or cope to his present while thinking about his unsettling past and imminent future.
Odd but atmospheric. I don't know if that combination works but that is the feeling that I felt while reading each story from this debut short story collection by Brian Booker. Well, sometimes, weird combinations can produce amazing results. And I believe, that's what happened with this book.
The author introduces characters that are flawed, troubled at most. There's depression, illness, bad dreams, paranoia, delusion, isolation, trials and folkloric superstitions. There's this teenage boy trying to lose his virginity who met the mother of his friend who survived a plane crash, a boy who contracted encephalitis caused by an epidemic that swept his town is being haunted by dreams of a catastrophic flood, a husband and wife visiting a tropical health resort with the fear that the wife might be dying from an illness, a disease researcher meeting an uncanny nemesis on his way home, a father looking for his missing son in a remote mountain cabin where everything seems distant from what they seem to be as before, an old pharmacist from a coastal village who has to protect his blind nephew who found a mermaid from village folks and a teenager who was sent to an eerie therapeutic boarding school.
The seven stories in this collection revolve around (untrustworthy) characters full of doubts and confusion. The stories were a mix of realism and magical realism hanging readers on a dream like mood. I have to question if the things they are facing are real or were just crafted by their minds. It's like I always have to decipher and navigate the minds of the characters to have a good understanding of what they are facing. This book made me think and analyze every story and situation to have a clearer picture of each piece. This is not mentally-grueling as it may appear from how I described it but the reader must just be in the right mood while reading it. For me, I advised to have this book read in one sitting. A momentum must be set and it must not be broken. Based on my experience while reading this book, I had a hard time getting back to this book after putting it down for quite some time for this book requires a certain atmosphere to be enjoyed. Much of like doing a meditation.
Each story in this book is meant to be savored. The book has a slow pacing and I believe it worked to its advantage. This book is not for everyone and it gets some time before it becomes totally immersive. There's that suspense that creeps with every page though the stories are far from being creepy. Some of the stories were so detached from the real world which will make you doubtful. The author has a way with words that after finishing each story, I was left longing for more. There was like a void that was left within me that needed to be filled up.
Overall, this book was a detailed and unique collection, full of depth with peculiar and inventive writing. It's a thought-provoking read about human's ability to respond or cope to his present while thinking about his unsettling past and imminent future.
October 14, 2020
Brian Booker, in this impressive collection of quietly unsettling short stories, masters two very different tones while maintaining his distinctive voice. Roughly half these stories are grounded in, for lack of better words, realism and lived human experience, while the other stories occupy the heightened territory of surrealist nightmare, fable, and fantasy, but the overall effect is complementary, not jarring. Booker avoids cheap sentiment, overwrought tragedy, and ironic distance, and his stories end with hope, dread, and mystery equally intact. The more fantastic stories have a beating human heart at their center, while the stories that could conceivably exist off the page aren't afraid to plunge into the overwhelming strangeness of everyday life, a strangeness free of affected quirk. I was both pleasantly and unpleasantly disturbed by every story, something that doesn't happen much for me with contemporary authors, and not just because Booker's stories of memory, loneliness, pandemics, chronic illness, and, in two stories, '90s American high school and college life, dredged up scattered pieces of my past and eerily prefigured my present.
January 7, 2018
This debut collection of short stories by Brian Booker was unexpectedly amazing. Booker creates solid, unsettling worlds with untrustworthy narrators and just enough backstory to make the reader suspicious of everything without tying a neat bow around every question. Compelling, unique, creative stuff. This is one to check out and an author to watch for the future.
September 6, 2016
When I received my review copy of this collection, the accompanying letter came from Bellevue Literary Press, an arm of the NYU Department of Medicine. They also published a novel I much loved, Paul Harding’s slim Pulitzer Prize Winner, Tinkers, so I was very intrigued.
I was not surprised to find that Brian Booker’s atmospheric and unsettling short fiction deals with the ways in which we respond to or cope with illness or infirmity – in ourselves and others. How illness can be polarizing and isolating. There’s a palpable sense of deep discomfort and paranoia pervading each story.
Booker dips into several different genres for each of his stories. The most atmospheric and impactful tale, “Brace for Impact,” is the story of two teenagers trying to lose their virginity juxtaposed with that of one of their mothers, the invalid survivor of a plane crash. The boy’s encounter with her has the strange menace of horror fiction, while “The Sleeping Sickness,” is a noir-ish thriller that takes place, Alfred Hitchcock-style, largely on a train. Some of the stories have a strange, dark humor to them, particularly the title piece, wherein a hypochondriac who believes she is terminally ill finds renewed vigor after a weekend with her husband at a tropical spa, and “Gumbo Limbo,” a sort of fractured fairy tale about a pharmacist’s blind ward who befriends a mysterious sea creature, sending superstitious locals into a fear-fueled rage.
The language is spare but affecting and adds to the often dream-like atmosphere of the tales. For example, this passage from “Gumbo Limbo,” which likens the tide to the beating of a human heart:
“And even if you never ask one question your whole life, still it says that one thing, always and only that one thing: I’m here. I’m going. I’m here. I’m going. I’m here.”
In exploring illness - real and imagined, physical and psychological – Booker is also examining, in a larger sense, how humans cope with mortality. This is a challenging, thought-provoking collection.
I was not surprised to find that Brian Booker’s atmospheric and unsettling short fiction deals with the ways in which we respond to or cope with illness or infirmity – in ourselves and others. How illness can be polarizing and isolating. There’s a palpable sense of deep discomfort and paranoia pervading each story.
Booker dips into several different genres for each of his stories. The most atmospheric and impactful tale, “Brace for Impact,” is the story of two teenagers trying to lose their virginity juxtaposed with that of one of their mothers, the invalid survivor of a plane crash. The boy’s encounter with her has the strange menace of horror fiction, while “The Sleeping Sickness,” is a noir-ish thriller that takes place, Alfred Hitchcock-style, largely on a train. Some of the stories have a strange, dark humor to them, particularly the title piece, wherein a hypochondriac who believes she is terminally ill finds renewed vigor after a weekend with her husband at a tropical spa, and “Gumbo Limbo,” a sort of fractured fairy tale about a pharmacist’s blind ward who befriends a mysterious sea creature, sending superstitious locals into a fear-fueled rage.
The language is spare but affecting and adds to the often dream-like atmosphere of the tales. For example, this passage from “Gumbo Limbo,” which likens the tide to the beating of a human heart:
“And even if you never ask one question your whole life, still it says that one thing, always and only that one thing: I’m here. I’m going. I’m here. I’m going. I’m here.”
In exploring illness - real and imagined, physical and psychological – Booker is also examining, in a larger sense, how humans cope with mortality. This is a challenging, thought-provoking collection.
October 12, 2016
Deep oppression pervades Brian Booker’s collection of seven stories Are You Here for What I’m Here For? The mood is confining, suffocating, maddening, the writing evocative of a heart pulsing beneath the floorboards of a cabin far from anywhere. Booker awakens---allays---awakens---allays---and awakens again profound tensions: Something is wrong. Everything is ok. But something is wrong.
Prepare to contend with psychic turmoil, ordinary figures sick in unusual ways: “…The bus didn’t come and Francie caught a chill. Then she got sick, lost her legs; they burned her toys in the backyard. She ended up in that school for damaged children, sweet Francie among the mongoloids and midgets…”
The collection’s eponymous story relates Gina’s stay, many years later, a grown woman, at a Caribbean resort, her pursuit of escape, a quest for release from the damage of the past. She’s enrolled in Sun Club Be* (don’t expect to be told what the asterisk is for; you'll have to use your imagination), which as the brochure explains, offers “An experience for our guests whose journey includes a health challenge.” A hotel, she imagines, that is in fact a hospital “attended by nuns in starched habits, a Caribbean breeze blowing in at the window.”
The settings include wide-ranging diversity: a wealthy Langley neighborhood in the shadows of CIA headquarters; a mountain resort for slope-side partying; contemporary seaside towns and long-forgotten histories of remote American settlements. Throughout, Booker’s eye remains as focused as it is true. Regardless of time or place the human condition holds the center, riddled with self-doubt and confusion as the body gropes blindly through the dark, recoiling in discomfort at the unknowable objects it touches.
It’s in this groping that Booker excels. He removes us from group therapy on the committed psych ward and plants us inside the lives and the minds of those committed at a time preceding incarceration.
Full review at http://wp.me/p42nDG-LS
Prepare to contend with psychic turmoil, ordinary figures sick in unusual ways: “…The bus didn’t come and Francie caught a chill. Then she got sick, lost her legs; they burned her toys in the backyard. She ended up in that school for damaged children, sweet Francie among the mongoloids and midgets…”
The collection’s eponymous story relates Gina’s stay, many years later, a grown woman, at a Caribbean resort, her pursuit of escape, a quest for release from the damage of the past. She’s enrolled in Sun Club Be* (don’t expect to be told what the asterisk is for; you'll have to use your imagination), which as the brochure explains, offers “An experience for our guests whose journey includes a health challenge.” A hotel, she imagines, that is in fact a hospital “attended by nuns in starched habits, a Caribbean breeze blowing in at the window.”
The settings include wide-ranging diversity: a wealthy Langley neighborhood in the shadows of CIA headquarters; a mountain resort for slope-side partying; contemporary seaside towns and long-forgotten histories of remote American settlements. Throughout, Booker’s eye remains as focused as it is true. Regardless of time or place the human condition holds the center, riddled with self-doubt and confusion as the body gropes blindly through the dark, recoiling in discomfort at the unknowable objects it touches.
It’s in this groping that Booker excels. He removes us from group therapy on the committed psych ward and plants us inside the lives and the minds of those committed at a time preceding incarceration.
Full review at http://wp.me/p42nDG-LS
February 14, 2017
Little lgbt, but very effective short stories. All revolved around some type of illness
May 31, 2016
This collection of seven stories has really stuck with me, much like George Saunders did. His writing may not be as polished as Saunders, but for a debut it is pretty impressive. I love the slightly surreal and the chilly menace that pervades the narrative, as these characters make their way through a skewed American landscape.
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March 25, 2017Fave stories: "Brace for Impact", "Here to Watch Over Me."
I read these stories about illness from a press about illness while in bed with a cold. Fitting.
I read these stories about illness from a press about illness while in bed with a cold. Fitting.
January 18, 2017
Lots of words that don't go anywhere. These stories are static and much too long. Unfortunately, another collection of academic fiction.
April 30, 2017
"Their hotel resembled a pink many-layered cake encrusted on to the side of the hill." (ARE You Here For What I'm Here For? by Brian Booker)
Now that is an epic metaphor. This quirky collection of stories has much to offer in the way of quirky imagery. There is also some quite unusual world building to be found in some of the stories.
It is also a very diverse book, featuring a wide range of characters. There are characters of all ages ranging from teens to middle aged people to older people. There were also a variety of illnesses explored as well as some disability representation. It was good to see this, however it was let down by the fact that the disability representation wasn't that accurate.
You can read a more detailed review here:
https://culturedvultures.com/are-you-...
Now that is an epic metaphor. This quirky collection of stories has much to offer in the way of quirky imagery. There is also some quite unusual world building to be found in some of the stories.
It is also a very diverse book, featuring a wide range of characters. There are characters of all ages ranging from teens to middle aged people to older people. There were also a variety of illnesses explored as well as some disability representation. It was good to see this, however it was let down by the fact that the disability representation wasn't that accurate.
You can read a more detailed review here:
https://culturedvultures.com/are-you-...
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews