E-raamat: Copy Cats: Stories

Crouse's voice has a cool, measured urgency to it that invites his readers not to miss the most delicate flickers of language as he describes his characters' often confused or detached states of mind. The people in his stories might be out of work or hold jobs at copy shops, but they are alive to the possibility that choiceto act or even to stay stillis always present. Watching them as they make those decisions provides subtle suspense as the collection unfolds. Lucidly written, darkly funny, these stories possess a crystalline acuity. An elegant debut. -- Charlotte Bacon * author of There Is Room for You * Crouse seems to have been charged by his characters to reveal the real stories in the world,' to penetrate the sheen and drive a spike down there and 'poke around to tap into them.' Crouse does so with elegant lucidity. His stories of characters who often struggle to hold to their lives with the most tenuous grips are told in high contrast black-and-white. Every detail is accorded an almost palpable texture from the gray-purple filling in the Danish in an office kitchenette to the obsessively overpolished shine of an automobile hubcap. Every character is granted some moment of sympathetic tenderness whether he deserves it or not. Every story rewards the reader with fresh insights into characters made from the people who surround us every day. -- Frank Soos * author of Unified Field Theory: Stories * The title . . . provides a sly hint at a unifying element in this clever collection. In Copy Cats, author Crouse imbues characters with a penchant for succumbing to the cat's infamous curiosity. . . . While something like curiosity, or a hunch, loosely unite the stories in Copy Cats, as a collection they gather to create a deeper effectsomething more like intuition. Crouse's characters possess a common spirit that inspires them to follow, and then to understand, something meaningful in their midst. -- Mid-American Review Startlingly realized and undeniably affecting. -- Virginia Quarterly Review [ It] comprises an impressive extended piece of fiction. Crouse's fluency with the darker sides of the average human life . . . makes this a promising debut -- Publishers Weekly Stark stories in which the bleak and the beautiful are tethered by tender, tenuous strings . . . The collection of seven stories and one novella effectively walks a tightrope between dark and light, the bleak and the bright . . . Crouse is gifted at crafting scenes that resonate in multiple ways. In the worlds he creates, nothing is black and white. Like the sound of metal on bone, Crouse's stories are in many ways 'too close to real.' But it's for that reason, for the chilling truths and the dark revelations, that the reader can recognize the light hidden beneath. -- Boston Phoenix Richly complex and deeply felt. -- Kirkus Reviews