Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

Written by Helen DeWitt

Narrated by Tim Campbell, Emily Sutton-Smith, James Langton and Karen Cass

Hailed a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Vulture, and the New York Public Library

Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Sep 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781978616226

Helen DeWitt

Author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods, “Helen Dewitt knows, in descending order of proficiency, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese: ‘The self is a set of linguistic patterns,’ she said. ‘Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone’ (New York Magazine).”

Reviews for Some Trick

[steve02476 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Had to really struggle to finish this. I liked a couple of the stories, but mostly I just didn’t understand them very well. I think I’d need to be smarter and better educated to really comprehend much of it. There’s definitely a sense of humor there, and it was frustrating to feel too stupid to really get it. Oh well...

[theampersand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A collection of curious, oddly shaped short stories, many of them set in university or professional environments. DeWitt's real distinguishing feature here having -- or at the very least, being able to fake -- an impressively deep knowledge of the subjects that her work touches on -- math, programming, modern art, dense postmodern theory -- and having an ear for the brash, strangely poetic jargon particular to each of them. Most writers do some research, of course, but DeWitt seems to have dug down pretty deep, with satisfying and readable results. The stories themselves can also be charmingly asymmetrical at times, less concerned with the "balance" that creative writers tend to admire and more about the genuinely surprising turns that life can take. Some of these seem to be pieces rescued from her student days at Cambridge in the mid-eighties, which also seems heartening: to some writers, nothing is every truly lost. Not exactly a revolutionary work, but recommendable to fans of lively prose and inventive, decidedly non-traditional storytelling.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some Trick: Thirteen Stories by Helen DeWitt is a collection of short stories all focusing on people who are very intelligent in one way or another. They struggle with money, compulsions or simply with everyday life. The academics value quick, erudite conversations, peppered with untranslated French, German and Latin. Each story, taken alone, comes across as clever and unusual, taken as a whole, the stories become variations on the same thing. The first story, Brutto, is about a young struggling artist who comes to the attention of a prominent art dealer and then sees her vision over-whelmed by his, and she's faced with the decision of whether to stick to her ideas, and perhaps have to give up art entirely to support herself, or allow her art to be changed into something unrecognizable. And in Famous Last Words, a young woman makes the following observation:There is a text which I could insert at this point which begins, 'I'm not in the mood,' but the reader who has had occasion to consult it will know that, though open to many variations, there is one form which is, as Voltaire would say, potius optandum quam probandum, and that is the one which runs 'I'm not in the mood,' 'Oh, OK.' My own experience has shown this to be a text particularly susceptible to discursive and recursive operations, one which circles back on itself through several iterations and recapitulations, one which ends pretty invariably in 'Oh, OK,' but only about half the time as the contribution of my co-scripteur. I think for a moment about giving the thing a whirl, but finally settle on the curtailed version which leaves out, 'I'm not in the mood' and goes directly to 'Oh, OK.' X and I go upstairs.

[berthirsch · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

hip and witty.