Description
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2013: How do you judge a short story collection? By its consistency? How often you laugh? Or by the number of times it breaks your heart? With Bobcat and Other Stories , the answer to the last question is seven, which is the number of stories that make up Rebecca Lee's first short story collection (and hopefully far from her last). The title story is perhaps the best example of what Lee does best. An innocuous dinner party reveals to the narrator that her marriage is disintegrating (or were those signs always there?). She says her honeymoon "haunted our marriage a little, mostly because it was a little sad for reasons I couldn't comprehend and felt I shouldn't disturb." Bobcat is a tricky balancing act. Lee has a knack for nuance, but never lets her subtlety dull the emotional punch. Even as her characters wrestle with tragic internal dilemmas, there's a distinct sense of humor that perseveres throughout. Bobcat and Other Stories is one of the strongest collections I've read in recent years. --Kevin Nguyen From Booklist Lee follows her superb first novel, The City Is a Rising Tide (2006), with an equally arresting and distinctive short story collection, in which her global perspective engenders strange encounters. The arch and clawing title story, though fastened to the well-worn armature of a Manhattan dinner party, zooms out in myriad directions as a woman describes losing a limb to a bobcat in Nepal, and the pregnant hostess worries about a coworker’s affair. Intrigued by the life-altering reverberations of hubris, friendship, marriage, class clashes, and betrayal, Lee, herself like a great cat in her stealth, speed, and slashing attacks, takes on academe in several mind-whirling stories, including one set in 1987 in which an act of plagiarism ignites a peculiar, heartrending alliance between a hazy-minded student and her professor, a Polish immigrant accused of being a “Soviet puppet.” In “Min,” an American college student accompanies her friend to Hong Kong, where he will join his father in working with Vietnamese refugees and enter into an arranged marriage. Lee’s gorgeously crafted, scintillating stories are imaginative and incisive, funny and profound. --Donna Seaman “The collection has so many good passages – whole paragraphs that move into pages with never a misstep – that any linguaphile could spend a great afternoon in a little spasm of dazzle.xa0 But a story is more than a collection of words, and these seven long tales demonstrate Lee’s prodigious talent for creating not just great lines but intricately structured, impressively plotted worlds.” —The New York Times Book Review “Mesmerizingly strange . . . Full of shivers and frissons . . . Highly imaginative stories . . . [Lee’s] eccentric eloquence . . . makes Bobcat so potent and unpredictable.” —Janet Maslin for The New York Times “Sometimes you reach the end of a story and go quietly, ‘Oh.’ And sometimes you gasp and go, ‘Holy guacamole!’ Not because a building fell down or a character died, but because the unexpected yet completely understandable came to pass—and made you fall off your chair. Again and again this happens in Rebecca Lee's slim, sly, brilliant book Bobcat .” —Oprah.com "Wise and funny . . . [A] near-perfect collection." — Entertainment Weekly “[W]ith deadpan humor, Lee’s light touch illuminates the contrasts in everyday life—warmth and cold, past and present, beauty and terror—imbuing her realistic tales with quiet depth.” — Bust "Astonishing prose . . . This fresh, provocative collection, peerless in its vehement elucidation of contemporary foibles, is not to be missed." — Publishers Weekly, starred review “[M]ake some room in your tote bag for this: ‘ Bobcat ,’ a slim volume of short stories by a prodigiously talented writer, Rebecca Lee. Her work is at once effortless and exacting, sophisticated and ribald.” — Denver Post “[A] breath of fresh air, squarely realist, but possessed of some of its own strange magic, the kind of book that it feels right to call ‘dazzling’ and ‘understated’ in the same breath.” — Flavorwire "Lee covers a wide terrain in only seven stories, touching on fidelity, sacrifice, jealousy, and obligation, with stories that often dial out slowly from tightly-focused beginnings." —PublishersWeekly.com, "Best Summer Books 2013" list "A shining example of furious and smart writing." —LibraryJournal.com “[An] arresting and distinctive short story collection . . . Lee’s gorgeously crafted, scintillating stories are imaginative and incisive, funny and profound.” —Booklist " Bobcat and Other Stories is nothing short of brilliant. Rebecca Lee writes with the unflinching, cumulatively devastating precision of Chekhov and Munro, peeling back layer after layer of illusion until we're left with the truth of ourselves . . . This extraordinary story collection is sure to confirm its author as one of the best writers of her generation." — Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk "Rebecca Lee's unforgettable debut story collection , Bobcat, manages to be both heartwarming and heartbreaking, not to mention witty and wise. I was so thoroughly immersed in these universes, so glad to meet her characters, these inquisitive, open-hearted citizens of the world that I did not want the book to end." — Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins "So alive to itself that it made my skin buzz . . . Lee's [stories] roam and dart Rebecca Lee is professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the author of The City Is a Rising Tide . Her fiction has been read on NPR’s Selected Shorts, and her stories have been published in the Atlantic Monthly and Zoetrope. “Fialto,” which appears in this collection, was the winner of the National Magazine Award for fiction. Read more
Features & Highlights
- "Wise and funny . . . [A] near-perfect collection."
- —Entertainment Weekly
- Rebecca Lee, one of our most gifted and original short story writers, guides readers into a range of landscapes, both foreign and domestic, crafting stories as rich as novels. A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor's shadowy past. A dinner party becomes the occasion for the dissolution of more than one marriage. A woman is hired to find a wife for the one true soulmate she's ever found. In all, Rebecca Lee traverses the terrain of infidelity, obligation, sacrifice, jealousy, and yet finally, optimism. Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it's impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they'd expected.
