Synopses & Reviews
Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim's stories. As they do the things we all do — bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo — they're confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved.
These stories, all published in The New Yorker over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America's most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described The Verificationist as “one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years.” And here is Antrim's best book yet: the story collection that reveals him as a master of the form.
Review
“In the last few years one of my favorite novelists, Donald Antrim, has devoted himself to short stories — not as finger exercises, but with a combined intensity, delicacy, and feeling for tradition that set him apart from any writer of his generation....What is it about Antrim? He writes as if prose were his native language: his sentences have the matter-of-fact pathos and absurdity of dreams....His themes are the Chekhovian classics — ambivalence toward the life at hand; yearning for the life that might have been — and he evokes unhappy love with a sensuousness and a subtle, plausible magic that recall Cheever at his best.” Lorin Stein, The Paris Review Daily
Review
“Engaging....Master storyteller Antrim has an original voice and an acute sensitivity to the spectrum of human emotion. These are stories the reviewer wont soon forget.” Library Journal
Review
“Couples unravel and anxieties are revealed in this batch of urbane, wry and interior stories enlivened by Antrim's talent for gamemanship with words....Antrim is attuned to the way couples struggle to make themselves heard or obscure their true feelings. A deceptively spiky set of meditations on romantic failure.” Kirkus
Review
“In polished prose that's analytical, sharp and concise, Antrim reveals the weaknesses in these fragile characters, burdened with even the simplest decisions they're unable to make.” Shelf Awareness
Review
“Antrim exhibits an elastic command of voice and a precise emotional awareness.” The New Yorker
Review
“Antrim is a master of voice and characterization.” Booklist
Review
“The most underrated quality in fiction nowadays is intelligence; the most overrated, imagination. Donald Antrim possesses both — but his intelligence is what makes you sit up straighter when you begin his new collection, The Emerald Light in the Air. Very quickly you realize you are reading something different from the mass of competent, earnest and depressingly dull short stories that are as commonplace now as ever.” Adelle Waldman, The New York Times Book Review
Review
“Exhilarating....[The Emerald Light in the Air] takes us in unexpected directions, moving from the outlandish to the intimate with the seamlessness of a single breath.” David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
Review
“No one writes more eloquently about the male crack-up and the depths of loneliness than Donald Antrim; the stories in The Emerald Light in the Air, hopscotching between the surreal and ordinary, comic and heartbreaking, are dazzling.” Vanity Fair
About the Author
Donald Antrim is the author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, The Verificationist, and The Afterlife. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. He lives in New York City.