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Deb Olin Unferth
April 21, 2017 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm UTC+0
Praise for Wait Till You See Me Dance
“Deb Olin Unferth’s stories are so smart, fast, full of heart, and distinctive in voice—each an intense little thought-system going out earnestly in search of strange new truths. What anmportant and exciting talent.”—George Saunders
“Deb Olin Unferth’s stories are wild, funny, and wonderful.”—Geoff Dyer
“This book is an astonishment—strange, brainy, and loaded with feeling. Deb Olin Unferth shows, with brilliant force, the startling vitality of the short story. She is a master.”—Ben Marcus
About Wait Till You See Me Dance
Wait Till You See Me Dance consists of several extraordinary longer stories as well as a selection of intoxicating very short stories. In the chilling The First Full Thought of Her Life, a shooter gets in position while a young girl climbs a sand dune. In Voltaire Night, students compete to tell a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. In Stay Where You Are, two oblivious travelers in Central America are kidnapped by a gunman they assume to be an insurgent but the gunman has his own problems.
An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable and lighthearted, but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal, in terrifying clarity, the rage, despair, and profound mournfulness that have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality, a quality that is reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders, but in Unferth’s unforgettable collection she carves out territory that is entirely her own.