How Animals Mate: Stories (Sewanee Writers') [Paperback]

Daniel Mueller (Author)

Book Description

Series: Sewanee Writers' | Publication Date: July 1, 2000

The characters that inhabit Daniel Mueller's stories are all outcasts of different sorts--a struggling poet trying to make ends meet as a stripper; an Aleut girl increasingly dissatisfied with life in an Alaskan salmon factory; an overweight man armed with a remote control, secretly changing channels on neighbors' television sets--yet their stories chronicle a similar effort: the quest to shed their outsider status and seek solace, if not meaning, within the mainstream.

A haunting and evocative exploration of dreams and disillusionment, How Animals Mate delves into the dangerous territories where psyches, pushed to their limits by desire, reveal themselves. A writer reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor and Truman Capote, Daniel Mueller has crafted stories that are compact, powerful, and uniquely American in style and ensibility.

"Daniel Mueller's first collection of stories . . . takes great risks and pulls off most of them. . . . [V]isceral yet beautiful."--Elle

"Daniel Mueller's stories are disturbing, graphic, and beautifully written. He is a uniquely talented prose stylist."--Alice McDermott

"A sizzling collection . . . In Mueller's America of rural burgs, sex and violence coil together like serpents. True stories. Mueller knows why they happen."--The San Diego Union Tribune

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you like the kind of fringe element who regularly populate the fiction of Katherine Dunn or Mike McCormack, then Daniel Mueller's How Animals Mate is the book for you. Each of these eight short stories focuses on characters who range from the tragically outcast to the downright grotesque. The protagonist in "Ice Breaking," for example, is a gay man whose AIDS-infected lover has just committed suicide by mixing it up with a train. Having collected his boyfriend's remains into a sack, Sy Johnson then proceeds to drag the dismembered corpse out onto a frozen lake where he also intends to take his own life in a way that is gruesome and effective in equal measure. Things aren't much better for the gay hero of "Zero," whose business is being driven into the ground by his sick lover's spiraling medical bills. And then there's Amanda, the lesbian erotic dancer in "Birds," whose life is turned upside down in a heartbeat when she runs afoul of a deranged customer. The title "Torturing Creatures at Night" pretty much says it all, and then goes on to elaborate even more in this story of a grossly overweight teenage boy who revenges himself on the neighborhood by roaming through backyards at night armed with a remote control, changing people's television stations as he goes. Readers with a strong stomach and a penchant for the bizarre will find these dark, well-written tales compelling. --Margaret Prior --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

This impressive, grimly humorous debut collection, winner of the 1998 Sewanee Fiction Prize, shows how the grotesque and the normal have so merged in American culture that moving from one to another is as easy as changing a channel. In the title story, arguably the best of the eight, Rich Revelle's family has recently moved to a small Minnesota town, where the sexually frustrated 15-year-old voyeur bears witness to the subtly cast psychoses and eventual dissolution of the neighborhood's unhappy families?including his own. Mueller's ingenuous narrator is the picture of normal middle American helplessness. In two other stories, the author also focuses on male, suburban adolescence, but his penchant for the grotesque goes over the top. The overweight boy in "Torturing Creatures at Night," wields a furtive authority over his neighbors when he hides by their windows and changes their TV channels with his remote control; the drugged-out teenage protagonist's behavior in "P.M.R.C." is decidedly more grisly?and lethal. Mueller changes territory in "The Night My Brother Worked the Header," vividly establishing his characters in a polyvocal tale set in an Alaskan fish factory in which a teenage Aleut girl has a brief affair with a college boy that reveals the underlying violence in her relationship with her brother. "Birds" is set in Albuquerque, where a lesbian poet/stripper who needs surgery returns to her old job at a strip joint. After a disturbing incident, presented with knife-edge keenness, she disposes of her life with sudden and traumatic clarity. Not for the faint-hearted, Mueller's stories shimmer from the unique combination of the sensitivities displayed by each of his alienated protagonists as they try to negotiate between their own painful inadequacies and their limited, poignant, ability to affect their fates. (Mar.) FYI: How Animals Mate is a volume in the Sewanee Writers' Series. It has been chosen for Borders' Original Voices Program.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: Overlook TP (July 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585670553
• ISBN-13: 978-1585670550
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,421,790 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential, January 11, 2000

By 

Nathan Oates (Columbia, MO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How Animals Mate: Short Stories (Sewanee Writers' Series) (Hardcover)

It becomes easy to float through books of contemporary short stories, but every once in a while you'll come across a book like this one that will jar you out of any notions of complacency. Mueller's collection is multifarious, beautiful, frightening, distrubing and gives more hope for the state of fiction than any collection since Ken Kalfus' "Thirst" or George Saunder's "Civilwarland in Bad Decline". This is a brilliant collection, worthy of accolades and most certainly the attention of readers.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Story Collection I've Read, September 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: How Animals Mate: Short Stories (Sewanee Writers' Series) (Hardcover)

These stories span a range of human experience that is staggering. Mueller is compassionate in his scrutiny. He deftly, vividly conjures worlds and inner lives with language that is sharp and sparkling, smart and fully engaging. I've never read a story collection that didn't have one or two (or more) pieces fall flat--until now. This is a solid, stunning book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Criminallly under-rated, February 27, 2007

By 

James Biques "bixx7" (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How Animals Mate: Short Stories (Sewanee Writers' Series) (Hardcover)

In an ongoing attempt to retrace my Amazon purchase history and review every book not yet reviewed, I find this excellent collection by Daniel Mueller languishing in purgatory. Why? Is it the brutal subject matter? The refusal to blink at life as it is lived by the most unhappy and emotionally misfortunate amongst us? Is it the strong writing?

I'm distressed to think that this remains Mueller's sole collection in nearly ten years. It is easily as powerful as many more ballyhooed debut story collections published in that time, and I hope we will soon see its mate. (Yes, I said "mate.")