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The Age of Discovery and Other Stories
“At its essence, this enjoyable collection explores how nothing is ever exactly as it seems.”— Booklist
“These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach.”—Eric Puchner
In Becky Hagenston’s fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft—and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes—the strangest discovery of all—unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what—for better or worse—they are capable of.
“These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach.”—Eric Puchner
In Becky Hagenston’s fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft—and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes—the strangest discovery of all—unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what—for better or worse—they are capable of.
- GenresShort Stories
200 pages, Paperback
Published August 11, 2021
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36 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 17, 2022
A consistently off-kilter menagerie of short story marvels. In this collection, Hagenston glides easily between genres, veering at times into science fiction, the post-apocalyptic, the surreal, flash fiction, and realism. What unifies these stories, various in so many respects, is their willingness to linger in her characters’ unglamorous, often uncomfortable lives, and to do so with such mordant humor and empathy. At times I was reminded of Lorrie Moore, in lines such as “’I’m fine,’ she said, as if being fine were something she could barely stand,” but Hagenston’s stories often depart from or go even weirder places than Moore’s do.
The premises in these stories range from the deliciously outlandish—a “Museum of Tense Moments,” a Celebrity travels to towns that have made the “worst-in-the-country-lists” and spends four days overhauling them, right down to “new collars [for] the cats and dogs” —to the more quotidian but no less deftly conceived. In one of the latter, a couple that has never traveled out of the country go to Arles and put their marriage to the test through a series of encounters with locals and other travelers. Indeed, tourism comes up in many of these stories, as characters travel seeking to shed their old selves and reinvent themselves, only to find themselves pursued and haunted by what they’ve attempted to leave behind, or to be confronted by echoes of their own lives. As one character observes, “Everything gone, broken, turned to rubble in seconds. And if that wasn’t enough, there was a fire, and as if that wasn’t enough, there was a tsunami. I feel as if I can relate.”
So many of Hagenston’s characters are broken or reckoning with disaster in one form or another. There’s Ned, who finds himself in a relationship with a woman who sends him to retrieve her lost finger after a single date, and who compares his life to “global warming: everything melting, everything floating away.” (He’s insightful enough to recognize that “it was man-made, by him.”) There’s Sharon, who “sells sex toys by the seashore” (what an opening sentence!) to old classmates who bullied her once and even now treat her with mild contempt, and mourns her mother, who drowned on that very shore. As another character remarks, “Hunger and loneliness: who could tell the difference?”
In a couple of cases, Hagenston uses the dual point of view to particularly powerful effect, as she juxtaposes the lives of people who fate or circumstance has placed on a collision course and allows us glimpses into the ways a single instant can irrevocably alter multiple lives. The most poignant case of this is “Sea Ice,” in which a professor fails to help a student during what appears to be a school shooting (it is a false alarm). The professor swiftly becomes an object of public opprobrium, while the student is elevated to a symbol of protest. Each character is swiftly divested of their humanity in the public narrative, but retains it wholly in Hagenston’s intimate portraiture, which painstakingly traces the vulnerabilities that brought them to this moment and those that they must live with in the aftermath.
My favorite stories shifted from day to day—like the Box of Rocks that the teacher-accused-of-being-a-witch, Jennifer, carries around with her at the end of “Hematite, Apatite,” they formed a kind of a “glinting path.” I think my favorite, though, was ultimately “Rise.” I was reminded of a very different baking story, Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing.” Although the stories are nothing alike in tone or genre, in each case bread becomes something that affords us the chance to slip beyond our human skins. In its messiness and its soothing warmth, it becomes a medium for connection, far more than bread alone. This is true of each of these stories—from simple ingredients and some oddball twists rise these shapely things, artful and nourishing and satiating.
The premises in these stories range from the deliciously outlandish—a “Museum of Tense Moments,” a Celebrity travels to towns that have made the “worst-in-the-country-lists” and spends four days overhauling them, right down to “new collars [for] the cats and dogs” —to the more quotidian but no less deftly conceived. In one of the latter, a couple that has never traveled out of the country go to Arles and put their marriage to the test through a series of encounters with locals and other travelers. Indeed, tourism comes up in many of these stories, as characters travel seeking to shed their old selves and reinvent themselves, only to find themselves pursued and haunted by what they’ve attempted to leave behind, or to be confronted by echoes of their own lives. As one character observes, “Everything gone, broken, turned to rubble in seconds. And if that wasn’t enough, there was a fire, and as if that wasn’t enough, there was a tsunami. I feel as if I can relate.”
So many of Hagenston’s characters are broken or reckoning with disaster in one form or another. There’s Ned, who finds himself in a relationship with a woman who sends him to retrieve her lost finger after a single date, and who compares his life to “global warming: everything melting, everything floating away.” (He’s insightful enough to recognize that “it was man-made, by him.”) There’s Sharon, who “sells sex toys by the seashore” (what an opening sentence!) to old classmates who bullied her once and even now treat her with mild contempt, and mourns her mother, who drowned on that very shore. As another character remarks, “Hunger and loneliness: who could tell the difference?”
In a couple of cases, Hagenston uses the dual point of view to particularly powerful effect, as she juxtaposes the lives of people who fate or circumstance has placed on a collision course and allows us glimpses into the ways a single instant can irrevocably alter multiple lives. The most poignant case of this is “Sea Ice,” in which a professor fails to help a student during what appears to be a school shooting (it is a false alarm). The professor swiftly becomes an object of public opprobrium, while the student is elevated to a symbol of protest. Each character is swiftly divested of their humanity in the public narrative, but retains it wholly in Hagenston’s intimate portraiture, which painstakingly traces the vulnerabilities that brought them to this moment and those that they must live with in the aftermath.
My favorite stories shifted from day to day—like the Box of Rocks that the teacher-accused-of-being-a-witch, Jennifer, carries around with her at the end of “Hematite, Apatite,” they formed a kind of a “glinting path.” I think my favorite, though, was ultimately “Rise.” I was reminded of a very different baking story, Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing.” Although the stories are nothing alike in tone or genre, in each case bread becomes something that affords us the chance to slip beyond our human skins. In its messiness and its soothing warmth, it becomes a medium for connection, far more than bread alone. This is true of each of these stories—from simple ingredients and some oddball twists rise these shapely things, artful and nourishing and satiating.
July 31, 2021
Really enjoyed this collection. It mixes the real with the bizarre and is strong throughout. Thematically, it very much focuses on discovery—revelations. Working on a full review…
October 15, 2021
Characterization: 4/5.
Writing Style: 3/5.
Thematic Potency: 4/5.
Pacing: 4/5.
Verdict: 4/5. At times zany and at others moving, Hagenston’s short tales channel the unpredictable and familiar into a wholesome package.
Writing Style: 3/5.
Thematic Potency: 4/5.
Pacing: 4/5.
Verdict: 4/5. At times zany and at others moving, Hagenston’s short tales channel the unpredictable and familiar into a wholesome package.
August 16, 2022
I always love Becky Hagenston's wry sense of humor. These stories can be quirky, sometimes dark, sometimes hilarious, sometimes both, and always thought-provoking. Hagenston's characters never disappoint.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews