Large Animals in Everyday Life

by Wendy Brenner

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, these stories are quirky takes on contemporary life in which animals, not always large, lurk around the edges. "I like animals and I like men" begins the hopelessly-in-love narrator of "The Round Bar," who follows her married country singer to Nashville in her own version of a down-and-out song. In "The Oysters," Pat Boone "not the Pat Boone" laments his love for his newly married professor, while delivering oysters to be irradiated. The oysters themselves are having a hard time deciding whether irradiation is a gain or a loss. Wendy Brenner triumphs in capturing all the normal oddities of life; and in the magic of a few words a bizarre but accurate images he creates our lives and how we live and breathe.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

162 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1996

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The oysters felt different, but it was difficult for them to say how. They felt as though something had been added or something taken away. They felt vaguely the urge to produce pearls, but they could not produce them. Clearly, they were leaving something behind, moving with smooth speed away from something of great importance, but what this thing was they could not remember. They felt frustrated, distracted. Where were they going? they wondered. What would happen to them? What were they supposed to do? Oh, they were only oysters! Who was there to tell their story, and who was there to listen?" - The Oysters

"Then, after the baby was safely grown and away at college, her husband had one afternoon popped his handsome head up out of the crawl space and said, "I am a goblin of the deep," and she had laughed at him from the kitchen, where she was chopping carrots, and then he'd gone back down and had a cerebral hemorrhage and died." - The Child

This collection is rife with the above--one of the best collections I've read in a long, long time.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love how brenner perceives life around her and tranlates it to the page...she was one of my professors, and i think she taught me just as much about living as about writing!

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the books I reviewed back when I was doing such things. Great stuff; I remember loads of details of these tales, which is saying a lot as I'm not good with short stories generally.

[Tommy]

Uncorrected proof

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendy Brenner is a great writer. These are fun to read.