Bobcat and Other Stories

Starred review from April 29, 2013
This first collection of stories by the author of The City Is a Rising Tide microscopically examines the familiar motifs of infidelity, apathy, and unrequited love, revealing through each incisive tale deeper, novelistic layers of humanity and truth. Each of Lee’s stories is told from a first-person perspective, and many of them take place on college campuses. They are all centered on unique and arresting set-pieces and showcase astonishing prose: as the dinner party in the title story disintegrates multiple marriages, the meal “is revealed as a collection of crazy bones”; in “The Banks of the Vistula,” a student plagiarizes her paper, accidentally revealing the shadowy past of her professor who “looked like a dream one might have in childhood”; and in the final, heartrending story, “Settlers,” which is also the collection’s shortest, a woman in the middle of a protracted miscarriage considers her baby, “with a heartbeat measuring once a minute, like one of those sea creatures that live at the floor of the ocean.” Lee writes with an unflinching eye toward the darkest and saddest aspects of life, often finding humor where least expected. This fresh, provocative collection, peerless in its vehement elucidation of contemporary foibles, is not to be missed. Agent:

May 15, 2013
A story collection in which a liberal arts education can't resolve the mysteries, complexities and absurdities of love. Practically every one of these stories involves a college campus, a familiar setting to the author (The City Is a Rising Tide, 2006), who is a professor of creative writing, and some stories feature those involved in creative writing or other quasi-literary pursuits. Yet the stories extend well beyond college life or the limits of much university-generated fiction, and the first-person narrators of the stories, a different one in each, rarely invite confusion with the author. Instead, as the rare male narrator says about architecture ("Fialta"), "I knew hardly anything about how to draw a building, except that it ought not to look beautiful; it ought to be spare and slightly inaccessible, its beauty only suggested, so that a good plan looked like a secret to be passed on and on, its true nature hidden away." Thus it is with these stories, with their hints of theme and defiance of resolution, filled with characters who are overly educated and articulate yet lack some crucial knowledge, which is perhaps unknowable. The narrator of this story is an architecture student who falls in love with another, a relationship doomed since she is the lover of their mutual teacher. Relationships in the collection frequently involve those from different generations or cultures (arranged marriages figure in two stories), with unequal power and infidelities the rule. One narrator ("Settlers") marvels at how her friend "had found the rabbit hole into real life"--husband, kids, apparent fulfillment--though such domesticity proves to be more an illusion than an attainment. As another says (in the titular opening story), "the dream of a happy family can be so overpowering that people will often put up with a lot to approximate it. Sometimes a little blindness keeps a family together." The power in these stories often lies in the puzzlement, for readers as well as characters.

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June 1, 2013
Lee follows her superb first novel, The City Is a Rising Tide (2006), with an equally arresting and distinctive short story collection, in which her global perspective engenders strange encounters. The arch and clawing title story, though fastened to the well-worn armature of a Manhattan dinner party, zooms out in myriad directions as a woman describes losing a limb to a bobcat in Nepal, and the pregnant hostess worries about a coworker's affair. Intrigued by the life-altering reverberations of hubris, friendship, marriage, class clashes, and betrayal, Lee, herself like a great cat in her stealth, speed, and slashing attacks, takes on academe in several mind-whirling stories, including one set in 1987 in which an act of plagiarism ignites a peculiar, heartrending alliance between a hazy-minded student and her professor, a Polish immigrant accused of being a Soviet puppet. In Min, an American college student accompanies her friend to Hong Kong, where he will join his father in working with Vietnamese refugees and enter into an arranged marriage. Lee's gorgeously crafted, scintillating stories are imaginative and incisive, funny and profound.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)