Large Animals in Everyday Life: Stories

by Wendy Brenner

The eleven stories in Wendy Brenner's debut story collection concern people who are alone or feel themselves to be survivors negotiating between logic and faith who look for mysterious messages and connections in everyday life, those sudden transformations and small miracles that occur in mundane, even absurd settings.

Brenner's stories range in setting from the rural and southern (a rotating country music bar, a dog track/jai alai compound, a grocery store, a natural cold springs sinkhole) to the urban and high-tech (absurdly bureaucratic companies and academic departments and a food irradiation plant). Often young and tough women seeking to hone their survival sensibilities, Brenner's characters are a mix of the everyday and the frustrated secretaries and scientists, a young supermodel, precocious children, fierce plumbers and mechanics, a psychic grandmother, an unhappy lottery winner, a desperate grocery-store mascot in an animal suit. And then there are the animals―real ones of all kinds who turn up at unlikely moments and often seem to be trying to help.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

168 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1996

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The oysters felt different, but it was difficult for them to say how. They felt as though something had been added or something taken away. They felt vaguely the urge to produce pearls, but they could not produce them. Clearly, they were leaving something behind, moving with smooth speed away from something of great importance, but what this thing was they could not remember. They felt frustrated, distracted. Where were they going? they wondered. What would happen to them? What were they supposed to do? Oh, they were only oysters! Who was there to tell their story, and who was there to listen?" - The Oysters

"Then, after the baby was safely grown and away at college, her husband had one afternoon popped his handsome head up out of the crawl space and said, "I am a goblin of the deep," and she had laughed at him from the kitchen, where she was chopping carrots, and then he'd gone back down and had a cerebral hemorrhage and died." - The Child

This collection is rife with the above--one of the best collections I've read in a long, long time.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love how brenner perceives life around her and tranlates it to the page...she was one of my professors, and i think she taught me just as much about living as about writing!

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the books I reviewed back when I was doing such things. Great stuff; I remember loads of details of these tales, which is saying a lot as I'm not good with short stories generally.

[Tommy]

Uncorrected proof

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendy Brenner is a great writer. These are fun to read.