Inhabiting a world that offers no guarantee of any veracity, the characters in these peculiar stories are driven to and goaded by compulsive and perhaps pointless reflection. They are haunted by unrelenting consciousness and knowledge of failure, yet are, at best, ambivalent toward any conventional equation of success. Theirs is a world of broken relationships, futile memory, constant appetite, and the certain knowledge that they are winding down in a culture in which it is impossible to door knowthe right thing. Frustrated and obsessed, they cannot articulate their lives and are entranced by the strangeness of the everyday.
Written with keen intelligence and biting humor,Carbineis a book about the ridiculousness of contemporary lifea book about what cannot be said.
GREG MULCAHYis president of the Minnesota State College Faculty. He is author of a previous story collection,Out Of Work,published by Knopf in 1993, and a novel,Constellation.
1. Hat
2. Doll
3. Jaune
4. Gallery
5. My 40th Birthday Party
6. Communication
7. The Bottle Game
8. Crow
9. Film
10. Catch and Release
11. Culture
12. Science
13. Shirt
14. Aperture
15. Weather
16. Thought
17. Driver
18. Suits
19. Architecture of the French Novel
20. Teepee
21. &
22. Circle
23. Alphabet
24. The Hungarian Writer
25. Account
26. Fall
27. The Descent of Value
28. Flight
29. Verte
30. Faith
31. Picayune
32. Museum Piece
33. Epistemology
34. Balance
35. One
36. Furniture
37. Hook
38. Reply
39. Sword
40. Picture Show
41. Carbine
In these 41 brief, surprising stories, Mulcahy mines everyman's deep sense of failure and spiritual alienation. . . . Mulcahy packs a surprising amount of power into each of these understated and beautifully wrought pló%
![CARBINE [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/6/0/9/2_3310213.jpg "CARBINE [Paperback]")