Author:Benjamin Percy
'The stories in Refresh, Refresh are big-hearted and drunk and dangerous, and there's a heightened, unnerving vibe as you travel through Percy's world. You never know where you will end up ... but you can be sure that he'll actually take you somewhere.'
Dan Chaon
Here is the United States of today. The young men and boys in this bold, fiery collection do the unthinkable to prove to themselves - to everyone - that they are strong enough to face the heartbreak in this world. The war in Iraq empties the small town of Tumalo, Oregon of fathers, leaving their sons to fight among themselves. There is a bear on the loose, a house with a basement that opens up into a cave and a nuclear meltdown that renders the Pacific Northwest into a contemporary Wild West.
'Benjamin Percy moves instinctively toward the molten center of contemporary writing, the place where genre fiction ... overflows its boundaries and becomes something dark and grand and percipient. These stories contain a brutal power and are radiant with pain-only a writer of surpassing honesty and directness could lead us here.' Peter Straub
A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale
—— Oscar WildeIt really does turn your blood cold
—— Colm TóibínTechnically, he is extraordinarily brilliant, and stylistically he's wonderful
—— David LodgeHenry James is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare is in the history of poetry
—— Graham Greene[James] is the most intelligent man of his generation
—— T. S. EliotThe Turn of the Screw is the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern
—— IndependentWe are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves... Henry James...can still make us afraid of the dark
—— Virginia WoolfDark, funny and disturbing
—— London Review of BooksThese 10 inventive stories, set mostly in the Florida Everglades, mix satire and sophisticated whimsy
—— New York TimesKaren Russell has produced an engaging debut. Her ability to integrate mythology and the supernatural with the very contemporary...is reminiscent of Angela Carter, but unlike Carter's many imitators, Russell never descends into whimsy... In St Lucy's, humans, ghosts and animals are utterly real; and Russell sells the genuine article, a seemingly effortless writer
—— Alisa Cox , MslexiaThese are stories that will sneak into the back of your brain and lurk there long after you are finished reading.
—— Global ReviewPoignant and wonderful story...concentrates, without effort, all Malouf's themes...it needs to be read
—— Prospect