Something in My Eye: Stories

by Michael Jeffrey Lee, Francine Prose (Introduction)

"I was drawn to Michael Jeffrey Lee's line-up of loners and drifters, imperiled children, and haunted psychos neither because I want to hang out with these bad boys, nor because I plan to cross the street when I see them coming, but because the invitation to inhabit their minds, to see the world through their eyes, and to watch their often unsettling stories play out in space and time enables Lee to do all sorts of extremely interesting things with consciousness and language."—Francine Prose, judge for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction


Michael Jeffrey Lee's stories are bizarre and smart and stilted, like dystopic fables told by a redneck Samuel Beckett. Outcasts hunker under bridges, or hole up in bars, waiting for the hurricane to hit. Lee's forests are full of menace too-unseen crowds gather at the tree-line, and bands of petty crooks and marauders bluster their way into suicidal games of one-upmanship. In Something In My Eye, violence and idleness are always in tension, ratcheting up and down with an eerie and effortless force. Diction leaps between registers with the same vertiginous swoops, moving from courtly formality to the funk and texture of a slang that is all the characters' own. It's a masterful performance, and Lee's inventiveness accomplishes that very rare feat-hyper-stylized structure and language that achieve clarity out of turbulence, never allowing technique to obscure what's most important: a direct address that makes visible all those we'd rather not see.

Michael Jeffrey Lee lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he earns his living as a typist, waiter, and nightclub singer. A frequent contributor to Conjunctions, he is also an associate fiction editor at the New Orleans Review. He is at work on a novel.

Genres: Short Stories

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 31, 2012

Reviews

[J.F.]

A brilliant debut by the young and incredibly relevant Michael Jeffrey Lee! I cannot think of a short story collection that does such interesting things with narrative that has been written recently. There were some moments in Something in my Eye that make me laugh aloud (sometimes in public!) and others that caused me wonder about the curious gravity of living in the dystopia of post-Katrina New Orleans. Michael Lee's lyrical panache compelled me to keep reading and I found myself continually entranced sentence after sentence, for pretty much all of it.

I carefully poured through this one a few months ago, and wish I could remember more of the twists and turns of each story. I recall a few funny and sticky situations that might make a reader wriggle in their chair slightly, but found the sensational aspect of it more interesting and creative than a writer like J.G. Ballard.

If you appreciate John Carpenter or David Lynch you are in for a treat, and if not, you could very well be pleasantly surprised!

Definitely plan to re-read and enjoy again! Probably going to be the best of 2012 for me

[Gabriel]

"Pity is easy for us; it's empathy that we find difficult. But we'll give it a try. We give all people one or two or possibly three chances."

[Alex Berger]

This was a series of bizarre stories whose weirdness can only be conveyed by the off-beat nonchalantly absurd language the characters used. A huge thanks to Francine prose for recommending this great work.

[Clark]

This guy hosts these drone/noise shows at his house, which not too far from where I live. I often end up at them, if for no other reason than to drink and socialize on his balcony. I didn't want to read his book for a while because I was worried I wouldn't like it and then would get drunk at his place and say something shitty. Then I decided that it didn't matter, he's a decent dude and probably wouldn't get too worked up about it, plus who really cares what I think? Anyhow, finally read it. It's totally good. I should get drunk and say something nice.

[Tristan Bath]

MJL tells stories that sing about the unspoken society beneath and behind where most of us live. Shame and vice are as essential as air and water to these characters' lives, and faith remains as powerful as any force in the universe. MJL rarely approaches his short stories with anything conventional in their form, (ab)using rhythm and structure to morph humble tales into tall filmic fantasies. The characters inhabit the page fully formed too, and any one of these tales has the potential for an entire novel all its own. Beautiful, disgusting, and fascinating.

[Rand]

Experimental but readable glimpses of somewhat endearing misfits. Most are tightly packed little non traditional narratives; some have a "moral" but all achieve a level of grotesequery which ranges from tragic to comic.
Take yr time with these.

[in8]

talked about it some here: http://www.5cense.com/13/OKC.htm

[J]

liked Warning Sign, If We Should Ever Meet, and The New Year. the rest of the stories in the collection are interesting sketches, unfinished experiments rather than finished stories