Refresh, Refresh: Stories [Paperback]

Benjamin Percy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 2007

The war in Iraq empties the small town of Tumalo, Oregon, of men--of fathers--leaving their sons to fight among themselves. But the boys' bravado fades at home when, alone, they check e-mail again and again for word from their fathers at the front.

Often from fractured homes and communities, the young men in these breathless stories do the unthinkable to prove to themselves--to everyone--that they are strong enough to face the heartbreak in this world. Set in rural Oregon with the shadow of the Cascade Mountains hanging over them, these stories bring you face-to-face with a mad bear, a house with a basement that opens up into a cave, a nuclear meltdown that renders the Pacific Northwest into a contemporary Wild West. Refresh, Refresh is a bold, fiery, and unforgettable collection that deals with vital issues of our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Percy's second collection (following last year's The Language of Elk) traces lives led in rural Oregon's fractured, mostly poor communities. The title story (selected for The Best American Short Stories 2006), presents Josh, a young man from small-town Tumalo who watches as men who signed up as Marine reservists for beer pay leave to fight in the Iraq War, including Josh's father. As Josh's unreliable first person details a deer hunt, the escapades of the town recruitment officer and the less-and-less frequent e-mails from his father, tension slowly builds. Set during a blackout, The Caves in Oregon follows geology teacher Becca and her husband, Kevin, as they explore a network of caves beneath their home, grappling to understand each other in the wake of a miscarriage. Meltdown imagines a nuclear disaster in November 2009, while the menacing Whisper opens with the accidental late-life death of Jacob, leaving his brother, Gerald, to care for Jacob's stroke-impaired wife. Percy's talent for putting surprising characters in difficult contemporary settings makes this a memorable collection. (Oct.)
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From Booklist

The title story in Percy's collection won the Plimpton and Pushcart prizes and was anthologized in Best American Short Stories of 2006, and justly so. In it, the small town of Tumalo, Oregon, loses its coaches, teachers, barbers, and cooks when the army deploys a batallion of part-time soldiers to Iraq. Two of the men's sons, still reeling from their fathers' departure, spend the time boxing as a way to alleviate stress, anxiously awaiting their fathers' communiqués by e-mail. The other stories, also set in rural Oregon at the foot of the Cascade Mountains, all carry a similar thread of emotional desperation. And that pain is inevitably mirrored in a threatening landscape, which here, in one viscerally rendered story after another, includes a mad bear, an eerie underground cave, and a dangerous hail storm. In one of the most boldly envisioned stories, "Meltdown," a nuclear accident has left Oregon a dead zone, unpopulated save for renegades like Darren. He drives down deserted, ash-covered streets because "living with ghosts feels more like a victory, somehow." These are hard-hitting stories from a writer to watch. Wilkinson, Joanne

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press; First Edition edition (October 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974856
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974855
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #208,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Benjamin Percy was born in the high desert of Central Oregon. He is the author of a novel, The Wilding (forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2010), and two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf Press, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire, Men's Journal, Outside, the Paris Review, Orion, Tin House, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, and many other magazines and journals. His honors include the Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories. His story "Refresh, Refresh" was adapted into a graphic novel -- co-authored by filmmaker James Ponsoldt and illustrated by Eisner-nominated artist Danica Novgorodoff -- that First Second Books (a division of Macmillan) published in 2009. He teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University. You can learn more about him at www.benjaminpercy.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, November 29, 2007

By 

Richard G. Denoncourt "rdenoncourt" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Refresh, Refresh: Stories (Paperback)

Benjamin Percy possesses a narrative voice that can only be described as hard, imaginative and haunting. At least two of the stories in this collection are good enough to be among the greatest short stories I've ever read. I highly recommend this book, especially for those who enjoy a very masculine voice that relies heavily on imagery and metaphor and for those who enjoy authors like Cormac McCarthy and Phil LaMarche, who have similar styles.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fasten your seatbelts, June 15, 2008

By 

Sam Goodman "Sam Goodman" (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Refresh, Refresh: Stories (Paperback)

"Refresh, Refresh" is rock'n'roll in form of short stories. It is an instant page-turner and you will be re-reading the stories more than once. The only other authors which gave me the same buzz were Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Raymond Chandler. Percy's language is brutally honest and polished, two qualities that are hard to come by in the space needed to deliver a short story. Don't forget to get "Language of Elk" along with "Refresh, Refresh."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tumalo: Where Masculine and Vulnerable Collide, October 9, 2011

By 

F. Tyler B. Brown (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Refresh, Refresh: Stories (Paperback)

Tumalo, Oregon is the American frontier of today- far different than the John Wayne, plus sized machismo, and tobacco-spitting Wild West of black and white cowboy movies.

Tumalo has many textures. Good and evil don't fight each other in horseback showdowns; they are confusedly linked like a jelly fish's tentacles. Pain and loss live on the surface of daily life.

Percy's Tumalo is firstly a masculine world. A world of omnipresent blood, of knuckle-tearing and sledgehammer-swinging factory work, snot and dirt-filled backyard brawls, Budweiser's consumed in front of nightly Wheel of Fortune episodes, and piles of animal bones.

This western and resourceful frontier brawniness, in all its masculinity, however, never ceases being real.

The turbocharged, big chested, Papa Hemingway manliness serves to merely color the inescapable pains and joy's of everyday life: a father at war, a wife's miscarriage, a father tormented with watching his daughter suffer through a destructive relationship.

The brawny, unshaven gruff, the stand-up freezers of hanging deer carcasses, the vultures, hunting dogs, and pools of deep red blood wouldn't work, just wouldn't work without the counterposed textures of human vulnerability and tenderness: the struggling marriage, an aging man feeling his mortality, a tyrannical and abusive husband, and father and son whom cannot find the words to pierce the silence of a car ride down a quiet country road.

The vulnerability and masculinity in "Refresh, Refresh" interplay in a polyphonic, brilliant way that is above all- authentic. These stories from Benjamin Percy represent life lived honestly, if not perfectly, and in unwavering recognition of the human struggles that befall, in some form, us all.

Take the interior, emotional world of the protagonist in "The Meltdown". It is a sculpture in high relief, set against the backdrop of a nuclear and Chernobyl-like exterior landscape.

This grim setting along with the "numbness" of the Iraqi war veteran protagonist play off each other in a powerful way. The pure desolation of the radiation-filled landscape only draws the reader further and more immediately into the interior world of the story's main character.

Percy, with prose that is as modern and authentically American as the new frontier world he evokes, as hardscrabble and raw as the landscape of Tumalo, and as resourceful and optimistic as the town's most praiseworthy inhabitants, has created a collection of stories not to be overlooked.