The Hospital for Bad Poets: Stories by J. C. Hallman

Product Details

Synopsis

Full of cryptic twists, philosophical quandaries, and fabulist turns, J. C. Hallman’s stories elucidate an intuitive understanding of the human condition. An alienated young man discovers the meaning of love in the pages of the biology textbook The Conjugal Cyst, and in the arms of two increasingly unavailable older nurses. As his father deserts his mother, who is subsequently encroached upon by his eligible English teacher, an adolescent boy constructs a wicker man in the garage, to repel successors and to summon his own adult identity. A mother and son witness a father’s backyard fling with a disturbed neighbor who has pruned a leafy cave out of the dividing hedge. A young couple’s romantic consummation is repeatedly interrupted by the intrusion of a narrator commenting on the phenomenon of eroticism. Richly allusive, these literate and literary stories explore modern riddles with no easy answers.

Publishers Weekly

Hallman's clever debut collection (after two works of nonfiction) invites the reader into ordinary homes and heads before dropping sly twists of the surreal to examine contemporary culture. In "Ethan: A Love Story," "odd uncle C-" bonds with his six-year-old nephew, Ethan, with the help of a violent video game. In "Savages," a high school grad's father begins an affair with his neighbor, rendezvousing in the cave she's cut into the shrubberies between their homes. In the title story, an unnamed poet is taken to Nietzsche's "hospital for bad poets" after collapsing and is given Rilke and oxygen to remedy his "chronic acuteness." The dark final story, "The History of Riddles," ties the collection together with a couple who falls in with a very serious board game culture involving deep philosophy and ancient rites. Sometimes the commentary Hallman's aiming for evades him, but on the whole, his collection is smart and hip, a safer Sam Lipsyte crossed with early George Saunders. (May)

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