Phone Calls from the Dead: Stories - Hardcover

Ten stories in all, the highly original PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD pulses with meaning. Alive and odd and needy, the characters in Wendy Brenner's stories grapple with the extraordinary and the ordinary, searching for answers from unlikely sources, striving to connect with each other and with something greater than themselves. Amidst a world of technological, natural, and possibly supernatural phenomena, they struggle with the most human of losses and longings.

Named one of twenty-five fiction writers to watch by Writer's Digest (along with Allegra Goodman, Jhumpa Lahiri, and William Gay), Brenner has been paving a new path through American fiction ever since her first collection, Large Animals in Everyday Life. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, described that collection as "chock-full of pitch-perfect dialogue and dead-on descriptions . . . intoxicatingly original." In PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD, the stories do just that, and then go a step farther. Whether it moves you to uncontrollable laughter or to tears, you won't soon forget Wendy Brenner's work.

A bodybuilder is charged with superhuman energy and an ability to make lightbulbs explode. A father tries to communicate with his dead son via a tape recorder. A thirty something women comes to understand her life through the experience of a German shepherd. Four ornery squirrels, tied together by their tails barely maintain their sanity.

Ten stories in all, the highly original Phone Calls from the Dead pulses with meaning. Alive and odd and needy, the characters in Wendy Brenner's stories grapple with the extraordinary and ordinary, searching for answers from unlikely sources, striving to connect with each other - or with something greater than themselves. Amidst a world of technological, natural, and possibly supernatural phenomena, her characters try to make sense of the troubled, blundering, and occasionally exhilarating relationships between man and technology, us and the Other Side.

Named one of twenty-five fiction writers to watch by Writer's Digest magazine, Wendy Brenner is one of the most original voices writing today. Yet no matter how far afield her characters may travel. Yet no matter how far afield her characters may travel and no matter how alien the terrain, Brenner is one of the most original voices writing today. Yet no matter how far afield her characters may travel and no matter how alien the terrain, Brenner always returns us to a place full of heart, both profoundly familiar and profoundly moving.