The Gnome Stories: Stories

by Ander Monson

Overview

An unsettling, wildly imaginative collection of stories

The Gnome Stories focuses on characters who are loners in the truest sense; who are in the process of recovering from mental, physical, or emotional trauma; and who find solace—or at least a sense of purpose—in peculiar jobs and pursuits.

A man whose wife has left him is robbed, so he decides to start doing his own breaking and entering, into his neighbors’ homes. When another man’s girlfriend is cryogenically frozen by her family after a car accident, he becomes a maintenance worker at the cryogenic facility, eavesdropping on visitors as they whisper secrets to their frozen loved ones. A woman serves as an assistant to the Starvationist, whose methods to help clients lose large amounts of weight are unorthodox, sadistic—and utterly failproof. Another woman and her robot assistant have been hired to tinker with the troubling memories inside a celebrity’s brain.

With The Gnome Stories, Ander Monson presents eleven unforgettable stories about oddly American situations: as surreal as an urban legend and at the same time perfectly mundane.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450123
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	02/04/2020
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.33(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

Ander Monson is the author of Other Electricities, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and four essay collections, including I Will Take the Answer. He lives in Tucson, where he teaches at the University of Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

12/02/2019

This offbeat collection from Monson (Letter to a Future Lover) touches on suburbs, relationships, and, yes, gnomes. The titular gnome first appears in “The Reassurances,” in which a man adopts a stretch of highway to propose to his girlfriend, Sharon, who turns him down right before she gets into a fatal car accident. The man remembers a story he heard from Sharon, in which a pair of campers on hallucinogens come across what they think is a live gnome in the woods and bring it back to their campsite; the next morning, they discover they’d actually found a human child. This kind of unexpected yet mundane horror is prevalent in all of Monson’s stories. The outward ordinariness of the characters always belies something deeper and darker, as in “Weep No More over This Event,” in which a man whose wife has recently left him gradually displays a penchant for violence that may have contributed to his wife’s decision. “Our Song” is about a man whose job it is to delve into and embody other people’s memories in order to help parse or preserve them; the narrator’s attempts to fix past wrongs ends in tragedy. Monson shines in his longer stories, where he’s able to work the magic of his sleight of hand—shorter, more experimental pieces like “In a Structure Simulating an Owl,” which finds inspiration in a patent application, are a little harder to land. Nevertheless, this is a strange, unnerving, and intelligent collection. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Monson parses the world and its constructs so finely, that anyone could be forgiven for feeling a little out of their depths. A little suspended disbelief may be required and certainly more than one reading, but if you wade deeply into these adventurous exercises the reward is often well worth it.”—The Brooklyn Rail

“Monson’s stories wrestle with grief and the mystery of life’s bigger questions. Though, there are absurd and comic moments that take the edge of some of the challenging possibilities they pose.”—PSU Vanguard

“Cozy domestic lives are routinely unsettled, sometimes violently, in this dystopian set of stories by seasoned experimenter Monson. . . . Bemusing SF-tinged fare echoing the tone and spirit of Saunders and Vonnegut.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Ander Monson has always been fascinated by . . . human creatures who unexpectedly shine their light on the rest of us. [He] is an American Kafka . . . The Gnome Stories will stay in your memory long after you have finished the book.”—Charles Baxter

“Like a haunted set of nested dolls, Ander Monson’s excellent short stories open up to reveal the surprisingly looming, gothic spaces that contemporary American life inevitably contains.”—Kelly Link

From the Publisher

2019-10-28
Cozy domestic lives are routinely unsettled, sometimes violently, in this dystopian set of stories by seasoned experimenter Monson (How We Speak to One Another, 2017, etc.).

The "gnome" of this book's title is a garden gnome, which intermittently appears here as a symbol of the intersection of weirdness and allegedly "normal" suburbia. In "Believing in the Future With the Torturer's Apprentice," a female narrator recalls her husband's secret life producing torture porn. In "The Reassurances," a man begins working at the cryogenic facility that's preserving his girlfriend, who was killed in a car wreck. The glib narrator of "It Is Hard Not To Love the Starvationist's Assistant" works at an extreme weight-loss facility where amputation is mandatory if goals aren't met. And in the concluding "Our Song," a man working on tools to archive and tweak our memories roams around the troubled psyche of a popular singer, attempting to seed her mind with a song idea. Some of the stories' conceits are high-concept to a fault; one, for instance, takes on the format of a patent document. But the virtue of the best stories is Monson's capacity to bridge unusual setups with compassionate storytelling. "The Reassurances," in particular, blends its science-fiction milieu with the narrator's repeated reckoning with loss, and Monson delivers that feeling with both heart and humor. (The narrator sponsored a stretch of highway in his late girlfriend's name before she died, and he's now legally bound to tidy it.) Sometimes the mood is openly comic: In "Everyone Looks Better When They're Under Arrest," the narrator bemoans a never-arriving stove that would complete his family's obligation to a reality show: "We are on the pointy end of some long existential stick." But the atmosphere is generally more muted as Monson contemplates how suffused with loss, fear, and mortality our everyday lives are.

Bemusing SF-tinged fare echoing the tone and spirit of Saunders and Vonnegut.

Kirkus Reviews