Intimations : Stories

Intimations
Author(s): Alexandra Kleeman

From the celebrated author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, a thought-provoking, often unsettling story collection that consists, broadly, of narrative diagrams of the three main stages in a human life: birth, life, and death.

Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and Tom Perrotta. It was praised by the New York Times as “a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation.”

In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of “living” where we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and the death-y period toward the end where we sense it is ending and will end only partially understood, at best.

The title is taken from one of the stories (“Intimation”), but is also a play on Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”—only in this case it’s not clear exactly what is being intimated, but it’s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. The middle, “Living” section of the book, is fleshed out with a set of stories that borrow more from traditional realist fiction to illustrate the inner lives of the characters.

At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as its characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house-party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood.

Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, Intimations is an utterly transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant young writers.

Review(s):
“Haunting…Wonderfully strange and eerie, INTIMATIONS outlines the confusion, loss, and anxieties that underlie the different stages of mortality, forcing us to re-examine the often unsettling realities of our existence.”
“Impressive…brilliantly executed…Reading her, you are left feeling dislocated by the world’s strangeness, and wondering if she and her discombobulated characters are really the sane ones.”
“A collection of twelve stories sure to please any reader who reveled in the heady strangeness of her novel…With this collection, Kleeman continues to establish herself as one of the most brilliant chroniclers of our 21st-century anxieties.”
“Like DeLillo, [Kleeman’s] spare sentences are each powerful in their own right, but they work together to form funny critiques of her surroundings…her characters pick apart the meanings of specific words in absurd, realer-than-real scenes.”
“Alexandra Kleeman sees things differently. At least, that’s how it feels when you read these curious and lovely stories. Existence, survival, touch: all become strange in this collection from the author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, as if the author knows of a different dimension or scientific method we have no idea is out there.”
“Brilliantly alive. . . . the world is parsed with a charming exactitude that magnifies all its latent marvels and especially horrors—the blacker and more peculiar these stories get, the funnier they are.”
“Just 30 and already being compared to Thomas Pynchon, Kleeman confirms her status with her latest: 12 deliciously unsettling short stories.”
“Kleeman presents family dysfunction, romantic entanglements, and survival through an intriguingly warped lens.”
“Following her excellent debut novel, YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINE, Kleeman brings her twisted, evocative style to a thought-provoking collection of stories….These stories, absurdist, bleak, and funny, defy straightforward interpretation and instead linger long afterward to be reinterpreted as they mutate in the reader’s mind.”
“[Kleeman is] a patient, lyrical chronicler of young urban people and this new collection of 12 short stories sees her take on all stages of human life in her unique style.”

ISBN:  9780062388704