Refresh, Refresh: Stories (Paperback)

~ (Author) "When school let out the two of us went to my backyard to fight..." (more)
Key Phrases: faulty builder, Benjamin Percy, The Killing, The Faulty Builder (more...)

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 (October 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974856
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974855
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #87,179 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 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

"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."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars reason to keep on going, January 11, 2008

By	Sam J. Miller (NYC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Anyone who grumbles that contemporary fiction is in the toilet, that short stories are dead, that the "younger generation" has not produced anything of real literary value, should shut up and read Benjamin Percy.

4 of 5 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)

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.