Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

by Charles Yu

Charles Yu experiments with form and genre to explore the stories we tell ourselves while navigating contemporary life. In "Third Class Superhero," a would- be good guy must come to terms with the darkness in his heart. A couple living in the Luxury Car Commercial subdivision in "401(k)" are disappointed when their exotic vacation turns into a Life Insurance/Asset Management pitch. The author struggles to write the definitive biography of his mother in "Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction." In these and other stories, Yu’s characters run up against the conventions and parameters of their artificial story lines while tackling the terrifying aspects of mothers, jobs, spouses, the need to express feelings.

Heartbreaking, hilarious, smart, and surprising, Third Class Superhero marks the arrival of an impressive new talent.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Humor, Speculative Fiction, Adult

173 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including his latest, Interior Chinatown, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for Le Prix Médicis étranger. He has received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, been nominated for two Writers Guild of America awards for his work on the HBO series Westworld, and has also written for shows on FX, AMC, Facebook Watch, and Adult Swim. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a number of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, Time and Ploughshares. You can find him on Twitter @charles_yu.

Reviews

[Thurston Hunger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard Yu on the radio, and decided to check out some of his work. The science student lapsing to fiction is always hard to pass up (wish there were more lapsing the reverse direction, but that is definitely upstream if not in fact illegal, and "The Kite Runner" doesn't count).

Anyways, my short review here is: Omni Magazine, wherefore art thou?

Yu's extremely short stories are ideas teased out like cotton candy to occupy a larger space than they will fill inside you once you've devoured them. If anything this book made me appreciate George Saunders more (another modern author who has caught an upwind of popular notice) and maybe I was too tough on, tougher than he was on his protagonists. Although Yu starts out a little less sardonic, he goes on to get trapped in a pretty complex Elektra world with his mother. Maybe so much that Yu's identity was often questioned (another recurrent theme in these stories).

Of course it may be just that it is difficult to be Me when you are Yu?

Two of the last three stories are extremely sketchy, or really sketches in my mind. The "32%" story is as cute as any story of failing relationships can be. I like the sense of solid satisfaction in mediocrity from the earlier stories, but that sort of dissipated into hastily written nanofiction for reading hastily in the post Omni-verse.

[Becca Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

much like the great Douglas Adams, Yu writes in this nonsensical yet surprisingly poignant style that i can’t get enough of. it’s funny, it’s sad, its absurd, it’s sci-fi, it’s surrealist. i love it.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is really hard for me to describe my feelings about this book. Yu writes well, and each of these short stories are heart-wrenching, sometimes funny, emotionally disturbing, and extremely honest. Many of them struck a cord in my heart, revealing the ordinariness of life and the way we often mask it, living superficially. So to borrow Frederick Barthelme's words from the back cover, "It's a delight to read someone who realizes that life in the world is not as simple as it is often made to seem."

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fine Literary Debut from One of Our Best Young American Writers

Inventive, smart and funny immediately come to mind with regards to "Third Class Superhero", the debut short story collection from Charles Yu, which playfully mixes genres as diverse as scientific technical writing, mainstream fiction, plays, comic books, and fantasy. The title story itself is well worth the price of admission for this short story collection; a melancholy saga about a would be superhero's struggle to gain respect among his peers leads to a bizarre Faustian bargain with someone who could be described as being in league with Satan; an intense, emotionally gripping tale told from the protagonist's perspective. "My Last Days of Me" is a compelling tale about the star of the hit television series "Family" hitting rock bottom after interacting with a new member of the series cast, told effectively as a television script. There are eleven stories in all, exploring familiar terrain like relationships with loved ones, work, and the desire to describe one's current psychological outlook on life. Yu's prose is noteworthy for its sparse, terse sentences, which are still effective in their depiction of characters as memorable as that actor from "Family" or the protagonist of "Third Class Superhero". Yu is a courageous writer willing to break literary conventions if they stand in the way of letting him tell a good story. Without question, this debut short story collection marks the arrival of a fine young American writer of fiction, whose literary talent has been celebrated as a recipient of the Sherwood Anderson Fiction award, noted by The New Yorker and compared favorably with the likes of Jonathan Lethem and Philip K. Dick.

[wrench · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I forgot to read the back and then in my vagueness failed to realise that this is short stories... Anyway, long story short I only like short stories when I know they are about to happen.
I think maybe it was because the first story read like it was setting up an entire novel and I was expecting an entire novel that made me disappointed.
But also, there are some really good stories in it.
I think it's difficult to really say much about books of short stories because they are individual works as well as sort of a themed fiction playlist...
But yeah. Good bits, not so great bits, but I did enjoy this book. I think Charles Yu has some really great mechanics and writing styles which I'm really into, but then sometimes because either I don't have a great memory and so have trouble following things or I don't know enough about physics, maths or grammar I end up feeling stupid rather than following the story and feeling like I'm appreciating and engaging with it.
Maybe I just need to re-read it.
Anyway, I liked quite a bit of this book, I really like (a lot of) his writing style(s).

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay I love Charles Yu!! So much!! It’s been cool to read his more recent novels and then come back and read his first published collection of stories. You can definitely see him trying out some of the techniques and ideas he’ll later use in “Interior Chinatown” and “Science Fictional Universe,” and though they’re slightly less polished and don’t always work 100%, I think his weird meta style works super well in short story format. You never have time to get tired of a gimmick or overthink where to draw the line between the literal and the figurative, which has been a problem for me with his longer writing. The stories are definitely more about exploring a concept than about character or plot or, frankly, story. But they’re super digestable and so fun and totally unconventional in a great way. My favorites were the last two in the collection because I felt they did the best job of meshing character/story with concept.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

_Third Class Superhero_ is a stellar debut collection of short stories from Charles Yu. Yu's style is really fresh and intelligent. Most of the stories read as hybrids texts: think short story crossed with tv script, math equation, commercial or brand ad, and prose poem. Sometimes, I felt, though, that the style overtook the story such as in "401(k)" and "The Man Who Became Himself." The highlights in this collection are "Third Class Superhero,"My Last Days As Me," "Realism," and "Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction." I adore the raw emotion in the stories dealing with mother and son issues. A smart fast read.

[Bandit · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally picked up this book at the library because I loved the cover. This book has a really great cover. This book is as good as its cover. Great clever short stories. I finally just got a copy of my own.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apart from the opening title story none of the protagonists in this collection of short stories have more than two dimensions, not that Moisture Man is particularly deep but at least he has a name. The protagonist in ‘Problems for Self-Study’, for example, is simply referred to as ‘A’ as in:

1. TIME T EQUALS ZERO

A is on a train traveling due west along the x-axis at a constant velocity of seventy kilometres per hour (70km/h). He stands at the rear of the train, looking back with some fondness at the town of (6,3), his point of departure, the location of the university and his few friends. He is carrying a suitcase (30kg) and a small bound volume (his thesis; 0.7 kg; 7 years).

Using the information given, calculate A's final position.

2. Assume A is lonely. Assume A is leaving (6,3) in order to find someone who could equal his love of pure theory. A says to himself, "No one in a town like (6,3) could possibly equal my love of pure theory."

The idea is a decent one—we all remember those kinds of problems from school—but can life be reduced to formulae? Actually, yes, it can. Whether a long list of formulae makes a short story is another matter but if you appreciate someone who looks at life sideways then there’s a lot in this book to enjoy.

The title story is the most standard thing in the book actually so much so that although very good it actually feels a little out of place but it is a nice morality tale set in a universe where you need paperwork to call yourself a superhero. What will our hero be willing to do to become a bone fide hero?

There’s a little story-with-a-story in the story ‘Realism’, an interesting take on Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’:

One morning, an insect wakes up to discover he has been transformed into a six-foot man.

The man gets out of bed and stands on two legs for the first time in his life.

He bathes himself free of slime, puts on a starched shirt and pressed suit, drinks a cup of coffee, kisses his human wife, and goes to work.

At work, he sits in his cubicle all day. Then he goes home, goes to sleep, gets up, and does it all again the next day. His boss likes him so much he promotes him and then promotes him again.

The man lives out the rest of his life like this, never a thought in his head, and no one ever knows that inside he is an insect, shrieking and shrieking in insect terror inside his huge, empty brain. No one ever knows that he is nothing but a big bug, a dumb, senseless cluster of impulse and sensation trapped in the strangest of all horrors: human consciousness.

If you like the idea here then you’ll probably enjoy this whole book. It focuses on middle-aged men lost in their own lives as in ‘Man of Quiet Desperation Goes on Short Vacation’:

Man, 46, at some point in his life, looks around and says, How did I get here? A quiet boy grown up into an even quieter man.

An October afternoon, a Sunday, a narrow one-story house.

A living room, a couch, some chairs. An accumulation of nouns and furniture.

An ordinary moment in an ordinary life.

He notices the woman sitting next to him, looking somewhat concerned.

"This is the story of our lives, isn't it," he asks. Not really a question.

"Yeah," she says.

For me the two best stories came at the end, ‘32.05864991%’ and ‘Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction’. The first revolves around the simple—and very true—premise that men and women are different. The story illustrates the fact by looking at how men and women interpret the word ‘maybe’:

[W]hen uttered by a woman to a man, when such man is capable of love but somewhat unclear in his idea of what love actually is and when such woman is perfectly aware of what love is, what it requires, and what it promises, and what it does not promise or fix or heal or even mean but despite or maybe because of such perfect awareness is incapable of allowing herself to be loved, "maybe" does not mean "probably" or "probably not" or anything vague or indeterminate. When "maybe" is used in this context, it means exactly 32.05864991%.

[…]

To Ivan, at this moment the relative desir-or, "maybe" is most likely a synonym of "probably" and also a synonym of "hopefully" and also "you are special" and also "yes." And also "be reassured, the world is just as you have always suspected it to be, principally concerned with you." To Janine, as established, it means just over 32%.

This is probably the funniest story in the book although there’s humour in all of them even the last story which every writer on the planet will relate to, every single one of us who’s tried “to turn a sliver of life into, of all things, a short story”:

All of my stories start out as uncarved blocks of time and end up as (i) a finished sculpted figure and (ii) a pile of leftover pieces. When I'm done cutting and chipping and breaking, and for the first time step back to look at what I've made, I am always disappointed. The figure I've carved is never what I thought it would be. What I thought was form is a twisted, grotesque shape, and what I thought was rich particularity is no more than an accumulation of idiosyncrasies, and what I thought were bold lines turn out to be jagged edges. Details that should be in the story are not, and details that were necessary have been left out, and details of both kinds have been lost, wasted, misplaced forever, unexamined and unexplained.

Not all the stories are easy reads especially if you’re not mathematically/scientifically-minded. That said there is some pure poetry to be found here:

HOW TO SPEND YOUR TIME HERE

The fine print reads:

On a typical day, a man of your age, race, height, and moral fibre makes 4,817 distinct choices. When used in compliance with the instructions, the Basic Package guarantees a maximum of three Minor Errors and one Major Error per day. You also get three Take Backs and a midlife Do-Over.

It’s like having tokens for hugs or back rubs. I just love this way of looking at things.

One of the other reviewers writes that this books “[r]eads more like a set of writing experiments than an actual short story collection” and that’s a fair comment. I don’t agree with another who said it was a quick read. It can be read quickly but a lot will be lost if you rush at it. Someone else suggested reading something else in between each story and that’s not a bad idea. These are short stories after all and there’s absolutely no reason why you have to gobble them up in a oner. As far as my opening comment goes, yes, it’s true none of the characters have much depth but that’s where the reader comes in. As soon as you start reading a story like ‘32.05864991%’ you know what he’s on about. Whether you’re male of female you know where he’s coming from.

Not all the stories deserve the four stars I’m awarding the book as a whole. I don’t think I’d give any less than three but there are definitely enough five-star moments to bump up the overall rating. For me at least. I’m definitely looking forward to How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

You can read an excerpt from the book here

[E.M. Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't realize that Third Class Superhero is a collection of literary short stories--I thought it was a novella-length work about a third class superhero and I was really looking forward to it.

So off the top, the mismanagement of expectations is my fault.

I loved both "Third Class Superhero" and "(410(k))," which map the disconnect between youthful expectations and mid-life level setting through the lens of superhero stories--which I have contended for some time are always about career and work--and the jingo pop of consumerism, respectively. Yu understands the nuances of superhero stories intimately and works genre conventions and sly insight to his favour.

The rest of the collection was less to my taste. I don't read a lot of literary fiction anymore. I've discovered I dislike stories where the point is to acutely appreciate the nuance of human ennui ('an emotion for rich people,' one of the characters observes in "Realism") against a high-concept narrative lens.

Regardless of the author's skills--and Yu, who also wrote Interior Chinatown, is very skilled--collections like this one leave me both apathetic and irritated. At the same time, I like to read outside my comfort zone and Third Class Superhero was an excellent exercise in that effort.

As with many things in this life, your mileage may vary. If you love high concept short stories, this collection may work beautifully for you.

[Chris Dietzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read three books by Yu and as far as I'm concerned he can do no wrong. Even though I'm stingy with 5-stars all three of his books have been easy 5-star ratings for me, and he's at that point where after only three books I have to say he's in my list of top 5 favorite living authors.

This was the first set of his short stories that I've read and one of the neat things is that you can clearly see the origins for both of the novels he would go on to write. While all of the writing here is great, the last part in particular stood out as being amazing.

[Bretnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Working my way through Charles Yu's books and none of them disappoint. I couldn't find proof, but I'd swear Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog was based on the first story in this book. Good mix of sci-fi, funny, melancholy, and quirky.

[John Sebastian Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 he don’t miss.

Some stories I’ll have to come back to at another time to fully understand.

[Mysteryfan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the novel well enough to try this collection of short stories. The title story was clever. Different takes on families. The author is a little too self-conscious about his cleverness.

[Richard Leis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, genre-defying stories that look at people and things—mothers, relationships, language, infidelity, etc.—in unexpected ways. A prospective superhero has to make a choice between hero and villain, and neither are especially promising choices. In the land of Marketing and Platitudes, a couple have to keep deciding "What now?" A man discovers himself, and himself doesn't discover a man. The mathematical precision of Janice's "maybe", a curious mother discovers the limits of language and storytelling, and an alien Florence swims in circles while time and space march on in escalating cosmicomics of the boring and mundane and lonely.

Third Class Superhero is a quick read full of surprising gimmicks and unexpected revelations, precise details and laments about how language and other disciplines aren't really all that precise in any particularly useful way, and characters that feel a little too close to home, even if home is a place you can't quite return to ever again.

[Erin Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind bending short sci-fi stories. Short stories aren’t my favorite but these were interesting. They definitely made me think.

[Sonya · Rating 5 out of 5]

1. Third Class Superhero (superhero application rejection, only get promoted if goes to dark side)
2. 32.05864991% (“emotional statistics” - quantify "maybe." Janine and Ivan's relationship across billion parallel universes with defined ratio of yes/no outcomes. They have no idea how things will turn out)
3. Autobiographical Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction (little vignettes in narrative form, trying to mother's biography in wake of her death)
4. The Man Who Became Himself (successful executive is terrified to find himself becoming trapped inside his own body --> refers to himself as “he” instead of “I")
5. Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-Cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation (trippy thought experiment game)
6. My Last Days as Me (TV Star chafes at recasting of onscreen mother and eradicates the line between actor and character.)
7. 401(K) (couple living in Luxury Car Commercial subdivision is disappointed when vacation turns into a Life Insurance/Asset Management pitch. --> hopes to attain Pretty Good Life.)
8. Realism (reversal of Metamorphosis --> what’s commonly accepted as literary realism is unrealistic convention.)
9. Problems for Self-Study (Multiple-Choice test - algebraic equations that attempt to account for the inevitable arc of a marriage - "A intersects with B in motion")
10. Man of Quiet Desperation Goes on Short Vacation (evaluates his existential condition --> suddenly looks for a way to let it out)
11. Florence (man with fish, boss asks fish is still doing the same thing)  set a million years from now, when centuries pass in the blink of an eye, and each human exists isolated on his own planet, communicating across the void.

[andi X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Upon reading Third Class Superhero, two things happened: 1) I fell madly, deeply, acutely in love. 2) I became hideously angry at the world.. I assume due to a resentment toward the society we live in and the amount of people who would be left confused by Yu's short stories when they so obviously spell out the mundane parts of our every day lives... in the most creative ways possible.

To say Yu's book changed me would be an understatement. I felt as though I walked away a solid five years senior than when I opened it.

Let it change you. His perspective on the world is not something you encounter often. He has reached a truly distinctive way for understanding the depth on life in such uniqueness that (especially for writers), can truly inspire one to change their own philosophies.

I found him to be comparable to DFW, in such a way that it was almost opposition that reminded me, yet the same amount of respect.

You, Yu, are freaking awesome. And after reading this book, I will read everything else you will ever throw my way.

[Mathijs Genuit · Rating 3 out of 5]

over het algemeen OK.
het boek bestaat uit een klein aantal verhalen met verschillende invalshoeken.
Ik vond ze niet allemaal goed, niet allemaal volledig, maar het boek is kort genoeg dat het over is voor dit vervelend kon worden.
lees het als je tijd over hebt, al is het maar omdat de schrijver interessante ideeën en invalshoeken weet te raken

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides]

Read the first three stories. Sad and cerebral short fiction.

[Rachel Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every short story in this collection is like taking an emotional beating about what truth and relationships really mean. Ouch, but I also love it.

[Shrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is so so good. There are tons of virtuostic flourishes that are clever and poignant and sad and funny - I was smiling the whole time I was reading this.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excellent collection puts me emotionally in a small lonely room, with little agency to escape since the exit keeps moving away from my approach. And yet I find the pull of these stories irresistible.

Weaving throughout are themes of displacement anxiety, identity crisis, writer's block, dealing with finitude. All heady stuff. Yu's gaze on the human condition is piercing and profound.

And Yu's style is refreshingly unconstrained. Many of these stories have no plot; they are verbal tone poems that envelope the reader in a mood that lingers long after the reading. Yu is not afraid to take risks, and I appreciate that.

My thoughts after each story:

The title story is a bright entry in the crowded "supers" subgenre, and could have been the tale of a joker in the Wild Cards universe. I quite like the ending.

"401(k)" is a cute indictment of bland corporate culture, jobs that suck the life out of you, Capitalized Thoughts, and oversaturated consumerism. It's hell, really.

"The Man Who Became Himself" radiates Being John Malkovitch vibes, sans voyeurism, but with John inhabiting himself. Yeah, this one's wild and yet poignant. And brilliant.

"Problems for Self-Study" hits some of the same high notes with its struggling physics doctoral student on the spectrum as David W. Goldman's The Axiom of Choice does with its lovestruck math ABD. I feel so seen. But ugh, Yu's inline equations didn't survive the OCR in the ebook I read.

"My Last Days as Me" is a brilliant tale of a sitcom actor Tinged with Melancholy. Wow.

"Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-Cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation" is an odd beast: a list of statements describing a (frustratingly) vaguely imagined multiplayer game and its high scorer's strategy. It ends up in that liminal Yu-space often inhabited by his middling protagnists who traverse a banal existence one degree of separation from a better life.

"Realism": I fell asleep several times reading this. Each time I woke again, back where I started. This is a story. This is not a story. No, it's a story about a story. Nay, it's a story that never ends, or never begins. It has searing lines like these:

My mother is going to die, my mother is dying, my mother has already died. All of this happens in one night. The night she dies. All of this happens in one frozen frame in the flight path of Xeno's Arrow.

What I'm trying to say is, it's hard to grok. Until the very last line. Then kapow!

"Florence": a tale about cosmic distances and time, about the senescence of humanity, and regret, and loneliness. This one destroyed me.

"Man of Quiet Desperation Goes on Short Vacation": in which the titular man, 46, realizes his lack of agency and can't stop running between "middles". Like the previous story, very meta and full of profundities:

Man, 46, is in the city. At some point in his life, looks around, thinks to himself, All I do is look around and think to myself.... Маn, 46, is at the movies. At some point in his life, he looks around, says to himself: "At what point in my life did I start saying things like at some point in my life?"

"32.05864991%". Oh good heavens, this is a brilliant treatment of the word "maybe", that Schroedinger's cat of matchmaking vocabulary, carrying multiple probabilities and meanings, which we anticipate with dread or hope, but that always collapses to a single state in every alternate universe, except perhaps this one. Breathtaking.

"Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction" captures brilliantly the anguish of a writer who wants to write the story of his mother's life before she dies, but suffers writer's block. A coda of sorts to "Reality" and OMG this story. It affected me profoundly; I was reading it while caring for my own mother. Hug your loved ones, y'all.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is physically a very slight book—less than 200 pages, with wide margins, generous line spacing, and lots of additional white space—but it delivers well above its weight. The stories, like a boxer’s deft jabs, are short, and they move quickly, maybe too quickly… The best present a twist—a distortion of reality or its expression/depiction—which serves as an invitation for the reader to double-check her own perceived external world. Oddly, the title story—where Yu explores the disappointments that make a man turn away from complacent goodness—defies this generalization, and it lumbers and reads like little more than a grittier, more savvy Walter Mitty fantasy. (In a world rife with accredited superheroes, Moisture Man tries to ascend the ladder to significance and first-class prominence. Problem is, his power is negligible and his contributions when working with bonafide superheroes superfluous and humiliating. At low ebb, thinking himself useless, he quells his conscience and opts to become a villain in exchange for the power of flight.)

Other stories offer a defter twist and more directly deconstruct elements of emotion and social connection, giving them new significance so that by/through distortion we see anew the contract we honor with others, how emotions/responses are social, learned. There is the mother who wants the narrator to read to her so that she can name the inchoate bits of emotion whirling about inside herself; the actor who tinges all of his performances with a wistful forlornness, replaced by someone who has a fuller repertoire of expressiveness; the story built out of notes about how to write a story that might express the degree of feeling the narrator has for his mother.

These stories are short, terse, and oddly both grounded and otherworldly. There is the story of the mute “me” who is distinct from his host David Howe and becomes more and more aware that he/me is sorrow, unexpressed. He tries to gain more control of his host and lies mute beside his/David Howe’s wife, eyes open imploringly, till she takes him/David into her arms and consoles him. This story disentangles and articulates sorrow as an emotion and substantive aspect of the whole, illustrates how the self is a collection of such me’s: one of sorrow, one joy, one anger, one arrogance, and so on.

Sorrow, regret, and apology are viewed by the seven-year-old game-playing protagonist in one story as liabilities that need to be scourged from one’s competitive responses. His discovery (and his secret to his highest ever score in his online gaming) is that “sorry” need never be uttered, that its use is an impediment, a competitive liability. The literalness of this overspills the story’s bounds, and we readers ponder just how it is that sorrow/regret/apology are given sometimes undue expression in the real/external world. (And just as we begin to ponder the utility of the narrator’s discovery, the story offers a “user’s tip” coda that explains in terms of this particular game how a player can override and deactivate responses/expressions of regret, which essentially entails making the system think that player 1 is also player 2, solipsistically negating any real need to express anything…)

I enjoyed the sensations and thoughts Yu elicited from me with these stories, like the sensations one experiences in good, short poetry. These stories thrive on the austerity of their depicted realities—their peculiar slant on emotions and interactions give them a suggestive vivacity that resonates long after their final words.

[Dan Plonsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title story is great. But then the rest of the book is increasingly intolerable. Yu engages in tired postmodern antics, wallowing in endless cycles of self- knowledge of narrators unable to escape self-pity, leading to the dreary apology that the story is that there's no story to tell. Where do we, the readers fit in? Maybe we're supposed to find this clever? Most of us have ourselves engaged in this sort of writing, briefly, when we were 20 plus or minus three years or so; it seemed humorous back then, but decades down the road it's just achingly tedious.

1. Generic characters are substituted for specific, by their role: "When we met, my wife was Pretty Girl in Import Beer Commercial"; a guy who plays the son in a family drama (or is it that that's how he sees his actual family?); David and the guy who is "in" David, etc. (Yu does this a bit more effectively -- because in service of political points -- in Interior Chinatown, though unfortunately, my feelings about that book soured the longer I read this one.)

2. A short story writer who tries and fails to write a story to tell his mother.

3. A Man of Quiet Desperation

4. A man who misinterprets "maybe," said by a woman of whom he's requested a date. Turns out that maybe = 32%

5. Abstract self-referential garbage: "I want to stop but of course I cannot stop, I cannot do anything except continue reading, word for word for word, until I am gulping the words down in whole sentences, accumulating injuries. And at some point I realize I am mouthing the words as I read them, and I wonder, how am I doing this? and for an instant the thought occurs to me that this person must have stolen my brain waves or at least my hard disk but that reflexive suspicion is quickly replaced by the realization that abstract premises, that is, potential stories, exist independently of the would-be writers trying to capture them."

[Ellen IJzerman (Prowisorio) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Verrassende verhalen, voor wat betreft vorm, stijl en zeker inhoud. Soms geweldig, soms net niet, maar altijd interessant. In het laatste verhaal, dat als titel Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction heeft, komt dit stukje raw material voor:

(0m 11s)

(I once had a dream in which I saw my whole life, past and future, spread out before me like a deck of playing cards fanned across a table. It was wondrous. There must have been millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of cards—my whole life—subdivided into slices of exactly eleven seconds. But the feeling of wonder quickly gave way to a sickening panic as I looked closer and realized each and every piece was incomplete, cut by some devious method, some demon algorithm, some perfectly evil genius, in such a way that no one card was a self-contained moment. Someone had managed it so that any single piece was completely worthless, a stretch of perfect insignificance that made no sense, gave no solace, offered no closure.)

Vond het een mooi, maar zeker ook afschuwelijk beeld, omdat het me aan Altzheimer en dementie deed denken, mede veroorzaakt door het gegeven dat het in dit hoofdstuk over Yu's (aangenomen dat het echt om autobiografische overblijfselen gaat) moeder gaat en mijn moeder, nou ja.. dat dus.

Mijn favoriete verhalen waren: 401(k), Problems for Self-Study, Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-Cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation, 32.05864991% en het bovengenoemde, hoewel ik ook van de andere verhalen heb genoten.

Leestip: lees één verhaal per dag, of hooguit twee verspreid over de dag, want achter elkaar de verhalen lezen, werkt niet.

[Math le maudit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ce recueil de nouvelles regroupe onze textes de l'auteur américain Charles Yu, qui n'a jusqu'ici été traduit qu'une fois en France, pour son Guide de survie pour le voyageur du temps amateur (et je ne l'ai pas lu).

Comme c'est souvent le cas avec les recueils de nouvelles, il y a du bon, et du moins bon. Quelques thématiques semblent pourtant se dégager de cet ensemble de textes hétéroclites : l'insatisfaction, la perte / dédoublement d'identité.

En effet, dans beaucoup de ces textes (pour ne pas dire tous) le narrateur est en perte de repères, mal dans sa vie, encore plus que mal dans sa peau, et se rêverait (ou s'est rêvé) plus beau qu'il ne l'est en réalité.

Un ouvrage pas tellement optimiste, et même assez grinçant, même s'il contient sa part d'humour (à condition d'aimer rire acide toutefois). Certains textes sont particulièrement réussis.

Je pense notamment à :
- Mes derniers jours en tant que moi (rien que le titre déjà)
- 32,05864991 % (oui, c'est le titre, et c'est mon texte préféré du recueil. Même que.)
- Problèmes sur l'étude de soi-même (qui est très intéressant dans sa forme).
- Super-héros de troisième division (le texte le plus ouvertement drôle et positif du recueil. Je n'ose pas employer "optimiste").

Un portrait un peu névrosé de notre société donc, qui ne semble capable de produire que des êtres insatisfaits, mal dans leurs peaux et résignés. Pas forcément le genre de livre à ouvrir en période dépressive, heureusement servi par une plume inventive.

[Thomas Spok]

Je ne donne ici que des pistes de réflexion, mais je fournis plus de détails là :
https://thomasspok.blogspot.com/2018/...

Malgré ce que le titre du recueil donnerait à croire, seule la première nouvelle aborde le thème des super-héros, et c’est celle qui m’intéressera en particulier ici [...].
Si aujourd’hui notre univers médiatique canalisé par les réseaux sociaux fait la part belle aux super-héros, multipliant les produits dérivés et donnant l’illusion d’être incontournables, il y a bientôt quinze ans les personnages musclés en costume étaient surtout associés à une poignée de films à succès (Spider-Man, X-Men) et la littérature les concernant était somme toute rare en français : Supernormal de Robert Mayer n’avait pas été traduit, ni les anthologies Wild Cards dirigées par Geore R. R. Martin.
Ce décalage entre les contextes d’écriture et de réception me donnent cette impression curieuse d’accélération du temps que l’on peut ressentir lorsque, conscient d’un point de départ et d’un point d’arrivée, on n’est plus capable de se faire une impression nette du trajet accompli.
Or, si le « genre super-héros » se diversifie au cinéma (du métahumour de Deadpool à la dystopie tragique de Logan), il est depuis longtemps infiniment varié dans les comics en tant que tels. Pour autant, il me semble que peu de séries ont traité le genre par le biais de la satire sociale, en raison de politiques éditoriales et commerciales contraignantes. Une nouvelle échappe à de tels désagréments.

[Kevin Luy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Third Class Superhero
Problems for Self Study
My Last Days as Me
32.05864991%

These are the standout stories for me.

The first a look at settling career-wise. when to do it, what it means. Using a superhero main character does that thing Magritte does in his art...makes you think about a normal thing differently because we're seeing it in surreal way now.
The second story...The premise and execution are equally fantastic. Written as a series of mathematical word problems we learn - by reading between the lines - about a couples relationship and of the uncertainty surrounding a new variable, a child.
Third is a super 'meta' story. Again the surreal premise allows for interesting observations on identity, relationships of all kinds, and the concept of emotion.
I don't know if the last story makes me romantically hopeful or despairing, which makes me love the story even more. An excellent story about the distance between the loved and the one who loves. And the ways our entire lives inform each disparate moment and decision in our lives.

Overall the collection provides a fresh take on pretty standard topics/themes while using always creative and often effective stylistic manuevers.

Honestly, this collection won't be for everyone. If you don't like the first story you read, you're gonna wanna move on.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

In which a young writer who's mainlined too much poststructuralism and a bunch of George Saunders strives frantically to convince himself that an exhausted form like the "short-story collection" is worth producing. He more or less wrestles his doubts to a draw, with story after story about characters trapped in narrative structures they dislike, resent, or fear. It's not to say that none of these work--I especially liked the one with the alienated male character forced to populate an endless array of Hopperesque tableaux, and the timeless one conveys a sense of endlessly perpetuated ennui quite nicely--but eleven stories all making that point, overtly or obliquely, wear out their welcome. Ends up feeling like the writing-workshop version of that old dodge where your submission is an account of how you tried to but couldn't write your story.

Nice to understand from this how his later works play the same structural games, but with history (Interior Chinatown) or genre (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe) to give him enough gravity and heart to make them feel like they matter.