Follow Me [Hardcover]

Paul Griner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 1998

An anthology of trickery, change, grief, and revenge includes the title story about an avant-garde photographer whose exhibitions ruin the lives of her subjects; three narratives that follow the exploits of Bolen, a vengeful trickster; and ""Nails."" A first collection. 15,000 first printing.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A beautiful New York artist merges sex and aesthetics in a series of increasingly risque and risky performance pieces. She begins by luring rich men to surreptitious meetings she never keeps, then mounts an exhibit of photographs of the married men she has seduced, and finally hires a private detective to take clandestine photographs of her. But her final "creation" leads to more than she bargained for. The title story of this debut collection from Paul Griner is just one of 10 offerings that examine the lives of characters who struggle to hold themselves together despite loss, deception, anger, and regret. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Cleverly dramatizing his own wry sense of karmic equilibrium, Griner crafts these 10 memorable stories of American life-set variously in cities, the burbs, the country and an expat stint in Portugal-into a wise, engaging meditation on unpredictability. In the linked first-person narratives "Clouds" and "Grass," two aging, very different brothers-one fascinated by clouds, the other by grass-weave bits of their respective expertise into two gently mournful memoirs. "Nails" takes this technique further as a doctor makes sense of his life and the untimely death of his son through an encyclopedic knowledge of fingernail pathology. The imaginative title story follows the rise of a Machiavellian avant-garde photographer in New York who hires a PI to follow her. Like the hapless subjects of her earlier exhibitions, she finds herself mysteriously, psychically invaded-even after the detective disappears. Three other linked stories trace the path of troublemaking drifter Bolen from a construction job outside Cleveland to F.T. Worboys's remote Texaco station. Worboys seems the victim when Bolen robs and vandalizes his station and shop; but as Worboys, in turn, sabotages cars to drum up business, his status becomes more complex. Griner's careful prose intensifies an entertaining debut filled with characters motivated by mingled, often contradictory desires.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Random House Value Publishing (May 31, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517311860
• ISBN-13: 978-0517311868
• Shipping Weight: 13.3 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,539,810 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

PAUL GRINER is the author of the acclaimed novel Collectors and the story collection Follow Me, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. He is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Louisville. The German Woman was partly inspired by an E. M. Forster quote: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."