Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #510086 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-02
• Released on: 2007-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

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

Review

Customer Reviews

Excellent
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.

naturalistic short stories with a brutal perspective of people in existential pain
The characters who populate Benjamin Percy's short stories don't mince words about the quality of their lives. Nor do they pretend to be optimistic when their surroundings essentially depress them or bring them pain. These people, all of whom live in rather desolate circumstances, distance themselves from spouses, family and friends; most struggle to gain some coherent understanding of life, often engaging in violent acts of self-creation. Percy's collection, "Refresh, Refresh," is disturbing, provocative and compelling. At times, readers may literally turn their heads from the detailed wreckage of lives the author details, but there can be no doubt that the Percy is a talented writer. His direct style includes clean, believable dialogue and remarkably beautiful imagery.

The protagonists live in small, east-of-the-Cascades towns in rural Oregon; they wrestle with the consequences of the American involvement in the Iraq war, a cataclysm that shreds the fabric of community life, bequeathing residents with the residue of cynicism and an oppressive sense of hopelessness. The short story from which the book takes its name gives is representative of the themes Percy emphasizes throughout the collection. Two rootless teenagers, both of whose fathers have "vanished" into the maws of the American war machine, find it nearly impossible to express the anger, disappointment and frustrations they experience. Bordering on the fringe of nihilism, they prefer destruction to creation, self-effacement to self-affirmation. Their act of revenge, perfectly realized, elicits disgust, horror and a begrudged admiration.

Percy knows how to balance the disquieting realities and disconcerting personalities. Whether we find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic world, where nuclear winter has caused a quarantine of half of the United States, or wandering in the subterranean caves of the Cascade Mountains, Percy navigates the terrain with people who are embittered, enraged and often impotent to effect anything less than violent change. Each of the ten stories in the collection resonates with an honest examination of pain.

"Refresh, Refresh" is not for the squeamish. Violence and despair abound. Its naturalistic approach to human weakness and its absolute commitment to a frightening exploration of people pushed past the edge of socially-acceptable behavior make this collection an important contribution to the study of American life in the twenty-first century. We may not like the images Benjamin Percy presents, but there can be no doubt as to how steadily he holds up the mirror.

Fasten your seatbelts
"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."