Ice Age

Stories by Robert Anderson

Reviews

“Finding a story collection like Ice Age was like rounding a corner in a museum and coming upon a roomful of Edward Hoppers. I was filled with a delightfully alternating current of strangeness and familiarity, and knew I was in the hands of an artist whose intelligence and yes, deftness, thrilled me. . . . [An] exceptional debut.”
—Edward Neuert, Salon

“This challenging, eclectic debut collection of short stories turns the world as we know it inside out. Highly inventive . . . Anderson’s sophisticated manipulation of language and narrative leave the reader breathless."
—Publishers Weekly


“Outrageous, sly, and bizarrely funny.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"Dreams, fantasies, eccentric characters, and bizarre situations figure large in Anderson's debut collection . . . What distinguishes Anderson's flawless writings is his ability to get inside his characters, to know their minds and dilemmas. On a scale of one to ten, Ice Age rates a 12."
—Library Journal

"Try to imagine a writer with equal parts Will Self, Jorge Luis Borges, and Samuel Beckett. Impossible? True. But Anderson comes close with his absurd situations rendered through biting satire and each story inhabiting a surreal landscape . . . It's a high-wire act that doesn't always succeed in the ten stories of this Flannery O'Connor Award winner, but when it does, it's just splendid."


—Booklist

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Description
The ten stories in Robert Anderson's debut collection are an inventive and daring foray into the world of the absurd. Leading us across a wide range of settings, from rural Texas to 1930s Spain to a Gulf War field hospital, Anderson shifts our view of the world to incorporate a set of characters slightly off-center and intriguing in their eccentricity. As we are tossed from one bizarre circumstance to the next, Anderson's sophisticated, sometimes playful prose combines the concrete with the surreal to convince us that we know very little about the world we complacently inhabit.
Series/imprint:
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

Page count: 200 pp.
Trim size: 5.25 x 8
  

Paper
List price: $18.95
978-0-8203-3514-8
03/15/2010

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Robert Anderson is the author of a novel, Little Fugue. He teaches English at the Hua Ren Academy and lives in New York City.