Something in My Eye

By Michael Jeffrey Lee and Francine Prose

An “intriguing and highly original” debut short story collection—winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction (Booklist).
 
Michael Jeffrey Lee’s stories are bizarre and smart and stilted, like dystopic fables told by a redneck Samuel Beckett. Outcasts hunker under bridges, or hole up in bars, waiting for the hurricane to hit. Lee’s forests are full of menace too—unseen crowds gather at the tree-line, and bands of petty crooks and marauders bluster their way into suicidal games of one-upmanship . . .
 
In Something In My Eye, violence and idleness are always in tension, ratcheting up and down with an eerie and effortless force. Diction leaps between registers with the same vertiginous swoops, moving from courtly formality to a slang that is the characters’ own. It’s a masterful performance, and Lee’s inventiveness accomplishes that very rare feat—hyper-stylized structure and language that offer both clarity and turbulence, never allowing technique to obscure what’s most important: a direct address that makes visible those truths we’d rather not see.
 
“Lee’s stories are intriguing and highly original, with a bent toward the weird, both in character and worldview. He is a master of voice, portraying the lives of men who are lost, lonely, and disturbed.” —Booklist
 
“Lee is very successful in creating a dream-like, emotionally disconnected state throughout, with intentionally stilted dialogue and plots that tend to revolve around forms of symbolic gestures, physical violence, or sexual deviance.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Release date: Jan 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781936747375

Book preview

table.

Contemporary Country Music: A Songbook

Title: SUPPORT THE TROOPS

Lyrics: could it be john walking though that door / at long last our son is home from the war we all still strongly support it is him isn’t it / come give us a kiss and a hug all around / don’t forget me john I’m your sister and I love you / did you see the banner we hung across the lawn the one that said welcome home john we are proud of you the whole state of alabama is proud of you / that uniform is as pristine as the day you left us john it sure is spiffy / I kind of expected it to be speckled with our enemies’ blood john why not / oh of course they let you wash it I wasn’t thinking john forgive me / what was it like over there all we had were our imaginations / we understand you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to but did you get the care packages we sent / your mother worked so hard on those packages john in fact it cost us a fortune to ship all that food even though I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t as if there weren’t grocery stores where you were there were grocery stores weren’t there john / did you get the letters I sent john did you get all those letters from my classmates there were a lot of them / you must have been busy john but we were hoping you would write once in a while but I’m sure you were too busy defending and spreading freedom but none of that matters because you are home and the army can’t legally force you to return for another tour and now you have some pocket money and college is waiting if that’s what you still want to do / john wants to eat everyone gather around the table while we say a long and thankful