The Entire Predicament [Paperback]

Lucy Corin (Author), Pam Houston (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 28, 2007

In this refreshing, funny, and startling collection of stories, Lucy Corin veers far from the path of staid contemporary fiction. She masterfully weaves traditional and experimental topics and techniques, creating a fictional world where people behave normally in the most extreme situations, and in bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. But thanks to her vivid, sharp prose and insightful first-person voices, even the oddest behavior is utterly believable. Unpredictable and playful, these stories transcend their apocalyptic feel to offer a vision that is clear, humane, and completely engaging. The Entire Predicament secures Corin’s reputation as an original, stylistically courageous voice in contemporary avant-garde fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A wide range of bizarre disquistions and turns of events marks Corin's debut collection. The narrator of "Wizened" declares that she "became crotchety" at age 24, wears housecoats and thick stockings, and spies on her neighbors for even the most minor signs of wrongdoing; with distinct Malthusian overtones, she declares that there are too many people, and that she only approves of the couple next door-whom she refers to as "the homosexuals." A similar preoccupation with an ominous future figures prominently in "Airplane," in which a woman explains a flight in every last detail, including the snap of the mesh bag attached to the seat, and "My Favorite Dentist," which juxtaposes the calm routine of a dental appointment with a rash of sniper attacks in Washington, D.C. At times, Corin digresses into an overly affected stream of consciousness ("Mice," "A Woman with a Gardener"), and some moments feel forced, as when a narrator refers to her knowledge that "if she continues to speak, some recognition of difficulty will materialize, as if difficulty is produced from the interaction of her voice with the air it encounters." At her best, however, Corin infuses ordinary situations with powerful and unexpected images, from which she deftly draws a dry, detached humor.
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Review

"Pure sleight of hand. How is it done? Come closer, I'll tell you. She closes her eyes and watches the movies playing 24-7 inside the lids." -Susan Reynolds, LA Times

 

"The Entire Predicament is fiercely strange and written with keen control. You don't read these stories: you undergo them. They are an event that is lived, not an object that is scanned. Language here is a tangible sensation; Corin's words have weight, temperature, odor, texture, bite. Vision and noise invade you. You become anxious. Then you may find yourself pinching your nose, squeezing your eyes, so as not to let this world escape your body." -Micaela Morrissette, Rain Taxi

 

"If prudence allowed, I would populate this review with nothing but passages from Lucy Corin's mesmerizing collection of stories, The Entire Predicament. My notes are filled with sentences and paragraphs that beg to be shared..." -Chas Bowie, The Portland Mercury

 

"Corin is brave and crafty enough to make us enjoy being spectators in the disintegration of their worldviews." - Ashleigh Lambert, InDigest magazine

 

"These stories take about ten seconds each to get their hooks in you for life. Do those hooks hurt? Of course they do, in all the funnest ways." - Roy Kesey, E!Online Books You Must Read: Picks for 2007

 

"Corin's prose is playful but sharp; she invites readers to get comfortable, then yanks the rug up from under us....Collectively, these narrators' musings on the meaning of life and day-to-day existence drive us into our own messy thoughts, our own secret ways of coping. They make a connection with us, as the best characters and stories should." -Anne Stameshkin, EnfuseMagazine.com

 

"These short stories are as smart as pinpricks, magic tricks. They go off like a string of firecrackers." -Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners

 

"Lucy Corin is a fearless writer." -Pam Houston, author of Sight Hound

 

"Lucy Corin's Swiftian satires are brilliant-stunningly so-and entirely original." -Rikki Ducornet, author of The Word "Desire"

 

"These stories are sharp, subtle, and surprising, rendering the truth of experience beautifully into fiction." -Lynn Freed, author of Reading, Writingand Leaving Home

 

"Lucy Corin's The Entire Predicament is a book of eyes and I's. Behold, wherever Corin's eye falls on this occluded world of ours, it is transformed in a twinkling-the scales come unhinged and we can't fail to see to see." -Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and The Blue Guide to Indiana

 

"Sometimes quirkily funny, sometimes shading into menace or serious derangement, The Entire Predicament zigzags its way over the walls we tend to build between the serious, the absurd, the humorous, the off-kilter, and the mad. This is an uncanny book." -Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Tin House Books (September 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097769898X
• ISBN-13: 978-0977698981
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #572,574 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lucy Corin's short stories have been published in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, the Mid-American Review, and Conjunctions, and anthologized in the collections The Iowa Anthology of Innovative Fiction (Iowa University Press, 1994) and New Stories for the South: The Year's Best (Algonquin Books, 1997 and 2003).

Corin's latest novel, The Entire Predicament, was published by Tin House in 2007. Her first novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls was published by FC2 in 2004. Currently, she teaches English at the University of California, Davis.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars For jaded and tired readers of fiction, August 13, 2011

By 

Jon DuBois "nyres" (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Entire Predicament (Paperback)

Lucy Corin is writing like nobody else these days. Without getting all literary, it's a prose style bordering on poetry. But that's not an adequate description, it makes it seem all ethereal and comfortable, which I assure you, it is not. The heading of this review reflects that we don't really have the literary review skill set but that maybe those tired and jaded readers of fiction who have given up will appreciate the heads up from a fellow fiction-giver-upper-on.

Start with "The Entire Predicament" (we've had a harder time with "Everyday Psycho-Killers").

Enjoy the feeling of an old friend's return

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like nothing you've seen before, January 1, 2008

By 

reader_77 (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Entire Predicament (Paperback)

In no particular order, here are some highlights from the elusive, allusive, hilarious, dead-serious stories in The Entire Predicament:

`Mice' - lyrical ecstasy over the Siberian Tundra

`Incognito' - in which a television reporter takes off her wig

`Some Machines' - PostModern Times inside the machine

`Refrigerator' from `Some Machines' - how to live by the light of a fridge

`Rich People' - a postmodern folk tale about pate, the type you eat and throw away

These are just a few of my favorites. As Miles Raymond from 2004's Sideways might say of Pinot Noir, "oh its flavors, they're just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and... ancient on the planet." For the connoisseur - very highly recommended.