Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

Author：Helen Dewitt

Hardcover: 224 pages

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (25 July 2018)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0811227820

ISBN-13: 978-0811227827

Product Dimensions: 14.2 x 2.3 x 21.1 cm

书籍简介

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world's piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. 

"Look," a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove "more complicated than they had first appeared" and "at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate." 

In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt's signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly "taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination."

作者简介

Author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods, "Helen Dewitt knows, in descending order of proficiency, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese: 'The self is a set of linguistic patterns, ' she said. 'Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone' (New York Magazine)."