The Withdrawal Method [Paperback]

Pasha Malla (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2009

Pasha Malla knows joy in all of its weird, unsettling, and wondrous forms. In their humor, warmth, and rigorous honesty, his stories clearly capture something odd and beautiful: the unmistakable feeling of empathy. From young couples fighting through the emotional trauma of the modern world to children navigating wayward, forbidden paths of a fantasized adulthood, Malla presents characters deeply entrenched in the familiar and hearts that slowly open to reveal the pain and unexpected love that life accumulates.

The Withdrawal Method offers worlds where Niagara Falls has run dry, where people’s skin can be shed in a single piece, and where ancient frustrated chess masters invent machines that unexpectedly alter the course of history. Reminiscent of Lorrie Moore, Haruki Murakami, and George Saunders, these stories are haunting, captivating, and constructed with a poise and precision that reach beyond technical skill.

Malla’s is an assured new voice; his smooth, mature style is punctuated by bursts of wild humor and enlivened by endlessly inventive storytelling. As individual narratives, these stories speak to each side of the protean human psyche, but when taken together they address with full understanding the fragility of our lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This debut story collection from Canadian poet Malla (All Our Grandfathers Are Ghosts) is a disappointing assemblage of pieces from a writer who has not yet found his voice. The mishmash of styles ranges from nearly Victorian (The Love Life of the Automaton Turk) to kitschy postmodern (The Film We Made About Dads). Several of the stories have undeniably empathetic characters, especially the nine-year-old girl who narrates Pushing Oceans In and Pulling Oceans Out; suffering from OCD, she lives with her mentally retarded brother and their single father, who masturbates to porn films after the children are in bed. At times, Malla's heavy-handedness feels cynical, as in Respite, when the story's theme is literally delivered via a tossed wedding bouquet that lands squarely on the plate of the narrator's cranky and uninterested girlfriend. But even given so many of the pieces' dramatic premises, Malla chooses the road of obfuscation, too often denying the reader crucial information. (Apr.)
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About the Author

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 308 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press; Original edition (April 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593762380
• ISBN-13: 978-1593762384
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,918,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars lovely story collection, May 8, 2009

By 

Abeer Y. Hoque (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Withdrawal Method (Paperback)

I love Pasha Malla. I thought maybe his short story collection would be on the flippant side, and not just because of its (IMHO not very apt) title, but more because of his hilarious silly punts on McSweeneys.com. But no. The stories are mostly sad, a little bit funny, sometimes surreal, invested in the loss and manifest of what I call Americana but in this case should call Canadiana since most of the stories are set in Canadia, and this last quite unexpected quality: beautifully written.

None of the stories is like the others, and I was continually amazed at how inside everyone's heads Pasha gets. Middle aged blue collar white dude? Check. Estranged adolescent daughter? Check. Renaissance courtier? Check. And he has to be a basketball nut and have spent some time in or thinking about hospitals. My only critique was that a couple of the stories have abrupt transitions, like they were written in parts, or from different perspectives and then mushed together ("The Slough" and the Automaton Turk one are two where I felt this).

My favourite story was "The Past Composed" and I don't know why exactly. There was something clean and compelling about it, despite nothing drastic happening (no amputation, no bull in a china store, no chimp swallowing snake, no coma inducing accident).

Naturally I didn't love all the stories, but I loved the writing throughout. Every story had a few sentences or phrases that were flat out gorgeous, bits of description, setting, detail (I wish I had written some quotes down). (It was also the book that made me realise that short stories are great for subway rides.) This is Pasha's first book and I'm much looking forward to his next.