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An astonishing debut: ten stories that explore--and reveal--American childhood in all its glory, hope and conflict.
In Short People we encounter, among many others, Jason and Billy, best friends who discover by the age of six how to conquer the world, only to see this idyll then shatter before them; Shawn, whose baptism compels him to make life a holy hell for everyone around him; and Evan, who finds that his pursuit of a Boy Scout merit badge is luring him into uncharted social territory. In the meantime, an agonized couple exhausts their expectations for their own kids, with an aftermath that afflicts them all. There's also Mary, whose sixteenth birthday precipitates an adulthood she is scarcely prepared to enter, and Emmy, who began that same transition when she was only twelve. Finally, and perhaps most harrowingly, is the nurse who with eerie prescience delivers so many babies to their destiny.
In a remarkable display of imagination and compassion, Joshua Furst reconstrues our preconceptions about innocence, purity, faith and memory through an unflinching, pitch-perfect gaze, with both authority and originality. Each new story enhances a collection whose importance is thoroughly contemporary and at once hilarious and heartbreaking.
Joshua Furst's Short People is a startling first collection of short fiction focusing, in one manner or another, on childhood's delightful and bewildering stages. He captures the utter joy and wonder of the formative years, making real the awe we long ago forgot, along with the time's bleak and nefarious sides -- those aspects of growing up we'd perhaps rather not remember. Bernadette Murphy
More Reviews and RecommendationsAn astonishing debut: ten stories that explore--and reveal--American childhood in all its glory, hope and conflict.
In Short People we encounter, among many others, Jason and Billy, best friends who discover by the age of six how to conquer the world, only to see this idyll then shatter before them; Shawn, whose baptism compels him to make life a holy hell for everyone around him; and Evan, who finds that his pursuit of a Boy Scout merit badge is luring him into uncharted social territory. In the meantime, an agonized couple exhausts their expectations for their own kids, with an aftermath that afflicts them all. There's also Mary, whose sixteenth birthday precipitates an adulthood she is scarcely prepared to enter, and Emmy, who began that same transition when she was only twelve. Finally, and perhaps most harrowingly, is the nurse who with eerie prescience delivers so many babies to their destiny.
In a remarkable display of imagination and compassion, Joshua Furst reconstrues our preconceptions about innocence, purity, faith and memory through an unflinching, pitch-perfect gaze, with both authority and originality. Each new story enhances a collection whose importance is thoroughly contemporary and at once hilarious and heartbreaking.
Joshua Furst's Short People is a startling first collection of short fiction focusing, in one manner or another, on childhood's delightful and bewildering stages. He captures the utter joy and wonder of the formative years, making real the awe we long ago forgot, along with the time's bleak and nefarious sides -- those aspects of growing up we'd perhaps rather not remember. Bernadette Murphy
Joshua Furst has an abiding interest in what kids do, and what they're thinking when they do it, which is why his debut collection of stories, Short People, is such a sharp, funny, generous-minded and promising work. Furst's stories revolve around the trademark fixations of kids' lives: anxieties about appearing cool, about winning and holding on to the approval of your friends and peer group, about figuring out your place in that outsized world of adult motives and agendas, about satisfying absent or damaged parents, or the image of them you still hold dear. Chris Lehmann
Like medical case histories put through a mangle, Furst's 10 stories are detached, distorted chronicles of the vicissitudes of childhood. Often narrated from an obtuse angle-first-person singular, future tense; first-person plural, present tense-they seem to freeze their subjects in place, stripping them of their defenses. Furst turns the literal-mindedness of childhood into a stylistic quirk, with decidedly mixed results. This tactic is on full display in "The Age of Exploration," in which two six-year-old boys while away a summer day. Any echoes of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine are soon dispelled by the plodding earnestness of the prose: "Billy would deny it, but he wishes he were as silly as Jason. Life can't be all books. You have to go out and play sometimes." Few children do play in Furst's stories, and when they do, their games turn into painful Darwinian struggles. In "Merit Badge," Evan finds himself on the wrong side of the adolescent divide at Boy Scout camp, when a treacherous friend lures him into a humiliating act and then exposes him to general ridicule. Black comedy takes center stage in "Red Lobster" when a deadbeat dad buys his kids dinner, and one of his sons takes his edict to clean his plate a bit too literally. Brief vignettes between stories give the collection extra structure. Their provenance is cleverly explained in the second-to-last story, "Failure to Thrive," in which a maternity ward nurse writes reports fantasizing about the futures of the premature infants in her charge-and decides to save them from their cruel fates, with tragic results. This is an ambitious debut, but Furst is at his best when he abandons his prosy experimentation with voice and perspective and tunnels directly into the unpretty minds of his young protagonists. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
The "short people" in this gritty, uncompromising, powerful first collection are children who have been visited by all manner of disappointment and cruelty. While there are elements of nostalgia and humor in some of the stories, most focus on trauma and loss. Each story has a poignantly vulnerable child at its center, and many of these children are victimized by absent or monstrously misguided adults. In "It's Blue Until You Let It Out," for example, a bright, talented 16-year-old girl becomes suicidal after her mother abandons her to pursue a career in Hollywood. In "Failure To Thrive," the most haunting story in the collection, a nurse in a hospital's premature baby ward yearns to bring peace to these tragically frail infants. It is only at the end of the story that we find out that this nurse has been "saving" these babies by killing them. What is perhaps most noteworthy about this collection is Furst's passionate and inspiring sympathy for these children and for the lost innocence of American childhood. Recommended for all libraries.-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Childhood and its discontents, in a harrowing debut collection of ten subtly interrelated stories. New York City playwright Furst begins with a nicely understated contrast between two six-year-old playmates: budding paleontologist Billy and imaginative, fantasy-driven Jason ("The Age of Exploration")-each of whom secretly fears and envies the other's distinctive qualities. Interludes between succeeding pieces offer terse vignettes of various children's experiences of parental neglect or abuse: they're in effect commentaries on the longer stories, whose relationship to them isn't clarified until the penultimate tale "Failure to Thrive," in which a maternity ward nurse reveals the extent and chilling nature of the compassion she feels for infants who are doomed to lives of unfulfillment and sorrow. Elsewhere, Furst creates scathing character portrayals of a teenaged girl on the threshold of adult sexuality ("She Rented Manhattan"); an absentee dad whose infrequent romps with his several children reveal both his charm and his heartlessness ("Red Lobster"); a hilariously foulmouthed Boy Scout hell-bent on becoming as "cool" as his unpredictable older buddy ("Merit Badge"); and an amorous boy helplessly attracted to a girl who's burdened and empowered by her intense femininity ("Mercy Fuck"). The two best stories portray a "family in crisis" brought on by its well-meaning father's "progressive" imperatives (no TV, no toys) and inability to empathize with his harried wife's failure to control either their kids or her own maternal and sexual demons ("The Good Parents"); and a fledgling born-again Christian (nine-year-old Shawn of "This Little Light") for whom baptism and confirmation turn into afervent "literal interpreter, for whom actions, thoughts, and beliefs have palpable, cut-and-dried consequences," and who can forget neither his own nor his parents' human failings. A thoroughly original take on the experience of being a kid, and wishing the whole baffling business of growing and changing would just go away. Agent: Richard Abate/ICM
| The Age of Exploration | 3 | |
| This Little Light | 19 | |
| Merit Badge | 51 | |
| Red Lobster | 73 | |
| The Good Parents | 85 | |
| She Rented Manhattan | 121 | |
| Mercy Fuck | 141 | |
| It's Blue Until You Let It Out | 165 | |
| Failure to Thrive | 183 | |
| The Age of Man | 205 |
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