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If You're Not Yet Like Me [Paperback]

Edan Lepucki
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)


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Book Description

November 1, 2010
ADVANCE PRAISE
"Why, when I was reading this extraordinary--no other word for it--novella, did I start thinking of Henry James? Thinking, specifically, of his adventures in human desire, cruelty, and perversity as found in The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady,and other works of highly civilized terror. Lepucki's work is very much of the here and now--funny, smart, sardonic, and fully sexed--but she goes at her subject with the same flaying relentlessness as H. James. I'll use that word again: Extraordinary. This little book is the real deal."
-Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters With Che Guevara

"Edan Lepucki's sly, smart novella is never quite a love story-in fact, rarely has the edict 'only connect' seemed more difficult to enact than among her small tribe of underachievers. Sex, however, retains its reliable consequences. And therein lies the beauty and the gut punch of this sneaky, deft book."
-Michelle Huneven, author of Blame

"If You're Not Like Yet Like Me tells quite a few damn good jokes before it decides to twist your heart apart. Gracefully written, barbed and biting; a touching meditation on the mistakes we make before meeting the ones who truly deserve our love."
-Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edan Lepucki is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short fiction has been published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Meridian, and FiveChapters, among other publications, and she is the winner of the 2009 James D. Phelan Award. She is a staff writer for The Millions and lives in Los Angeles, California, where she was born and raised.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 102 pages
  • Publisher: Flatmancrooked (November 1, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0982034873
  • ISBN-13: 978-0982034873
  • Product Dimensions: 0.2 x 7.9 x 4.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,379,652 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A voice-driven story that gives Carver a run his money November 15, 2010
Format:Paperback
Lepuki's very short book is a captivating story driven by voice. The insufferable protagonist is a plain, self-loathing girl with an incisive power of observation and the unfiltered honesty and (unreliable) self-awareness of very intelligent but unmotivated people. The character takes us in the second person singular through a fleeting and unremarkable love affair (that none-the-less changes everything). It is a very American story in that it takes an everyday subject, plain characters, and the quotidian of events that are unremarkable to the flat eye of the untrained observer and turns them into well-lit, textured pages filled with wisdom and insight about life and emotions, by focusing a mature writer's eye on the significance of these events, and taking them far by the sheer power of the voice and the writer's turn-of-phrases and turn-of-images. It reminds me of Carver's writing in "What we talk about when we talk about love", though I enjoy more Lepuki's deeper plunges of self-awareness than Carver's utter flatness and his characters' unmanned drift.
One can also say that the story is very L.A. and I can swear that I have been in that coffee house and that bar and that diner. I swear I have also been in that apartment and in her tub. I may even have dated that girl before.
The book ends abruptly, as if the story fell from a sudden cliff, in what is apparently a signature Lepuki literary characteristic. The flavor of the story lingers in your mouth, perhaps because, as with any good dish, if you are left wanting more, you appreciate the exquisite culinary delicacy much more than if you were served a full plate.
This book is too short, though, and it leaves you thirsty for more Lepuki. One can only hope that she publishes a new book soon, perhaps a longer one, or otherwise, one filled with several short stories.
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5.0 out of 5 stars A girl will bleed and then she will cry September 22, 2011
Format:Paperback
This little romance creates the character of its narrator Joellyn (and the "you, baby" to whom she writes) from the inside out, giving the reader a feeling of unusual closeness with the narrator, almost as if we were truly inside her, which in a sense we are (nothing is too embarrassing for her to admit to us, putting the reader in a position of strained, almost painful voyeurism).

What a surprise near the end, then, when we learn that every word written in the first 70 pages had another meaning, a meaning that manages to be both darker and more optimistic than we might initially think. Even the language then becomes deliciously double-sided. Take, for example, the aphorism "A girl will bleed and then she will cry," introduced as part of a flashback to Joellyn's childhood, when she injured her hand playacting as a woman warrior; this evocative truism turns out to have at least three meanings and to offer three different ways of regarding the action of Joellyn's tiny, banal but completely absorbing story.

Similarly, at the turning point of the book, another character's response to Joellyn (sorry for the awkward description here; I'm trying not to spoil this wonderful moment in the book) suddenly allows us to see our protagonist from a completely different perspective and to understand secrets of her character that the intimacy of the book had hidden from us earlier.

A tight little work of genius. I want to read more of Lepucki, but I didn't wish this novella were any longer. I think it is just perfect as it is.
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