Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories: Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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You took Alex to the Bronx Zoo once—or was it Anthony?—to see if the primates might make some magic for you, but the Monkey House was gone. It had been torn down in 2012. By publishing your document, the content will be optimally indexed by Google via AI and sorted into the right category for over 500 million ePaper readers on YUMPU. Bob-Waksberg’s fiction debut will capture many readers with its formal innovation, playful language, and relatable portraits of romance gone awry.” — Booklist

But now I feel known and I feel loved. So I would like to think that future books I write will be able to maintain a little bit of everything. I’ve allowed myself to change and write in ways that reflect how I feel about things now. Some of the stories in this book I could not write now, so I’m happy to have this record of them. He used to call her a koala because of the way she wrapped herself around him in bed, like a koala on a branch. She had wrapped her whole life around him, like a koala on a branch. And now the branch was gone and Lucinda had to deal with the fact that her life was now wrapped around nothing–which of course was all perfectly normal. All the pain Lucinda now felt was normal. The emptiness was normal. The harsh incinerating b boring awful raw barren obsessive numb five-hundred-volt nothingness now completely consuming her was so totally average.” Giorgis: How did you think about writing about guilt, especially in stories such as “We Men of Science,” which follows a man who transgresses in a series of small ways that ultimately prove disastrous? Science will live on after we're all dead. Science will survive with or without our attempts to understand it; science doesn't care.”Bob-Waksberg: Working on a TV show has really helped me to think visually, because I [naturally] think in terms of dialogue, or internal thoughts, first. Often, as a reader, I am less interested in scene description … I don’t have a lot of character descriptions [in the collection] because I like the idea that people can read this story and feel like, Oh, this is me. I think when you hear, “Her blue eyes sparkle,” you might go, Oh, I guess it’s not me then. A struggling employee at a theme park of U.S. presidents who discovers that love can’t be genetically modified. Family drama abounds in “You Want to Know What Plays are Like?” when a sister is invited to watch her brother’s play that she swears is based on their dysfunctional family, opening up some wounds and unleashing not a few family secrets.

In “We Men of Science,” a scientist named Yoni opens a door to an alternate dimension. He falls in love with a woman in the alternate dimension, but he feels that he should not act on this attraction, as Yoni is married and his wife is pregnant. In “Lies We Told Each Other (a partial list),” the story recounts lies told between two members of a dysfunctional relationship. A prose poem of sorts, simply titled “the poem,” is about a love poem gone awry was one of the experimental pieces that worked well - a sort of self-referential and metafictive piece that sang.Not every story in the collection ends so hopefully, but Bob-Waksberg still conveys a tenuous reverence for love and those who continue to seek it even in the face of disappointment. He traces the tenor of both the show and the new book to many early inspirations: among them, the author David Rakoff’s Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel; Jonathan Safran Foer’s “ A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease”; Katherine Heiny’s “ How to Give the Wrong Impression”; Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments; and the work of George Saunders. I loved Mutt, in that way that you love something when you’re at a place in your life when you’re ready to love something and there’s a thing there that you can love.” You can put to rest the fear that you were a blip in this other person's life, a footnote. What you did was important. You hurt somebody, and somebody hurt you.” SIDENOTE - i also really like the playfulness with fonts that occurs in this story and several others throughout the collection. it’s weird and wonky and fun. Another story that stood out was the (in comparison) quite a middle-of-the-road office romance turned sour in “The Average of All Possible Things.” But the central character Lucinda and her inner struggles are so realistically portrayed that you can’t help but feel for her as she tries to maintain a stoic front at work.

Showcases Bob-Waksberg’s talent for conjuring fantastical scenarios and writing about them with a straight face. . . . Human relationships, he seems to be saying, are weirder than anything else our imaginations can come up with.” —NPR El club de la lucha, una de las novelas contemporáneas más originales y provocadoras, que ya se ha convertido en un clásico underground.a bitterbleak comedy, in outline form, bullet-pointing a couple’s relationship arc—all the empty reassurances, promises, self-delusions, and gaslighting that goes into maintaining a healthy modern relationship. another brief one, but it’s astute and funny, plus it gets points for successfully suggesting the entire body of a relationship using only these skeletal snippets. More of the You That You Already Are – another case of the absurd premise with serious underpinnings: a guy who plays Chester A. Arthur at a theme park based on US presidents, whose park is being taken over by some misguided scientists, but who also has a sister with cancer who he cares very deeply about There are two kinds of people, he thought: the people you don’t want to touch because you’re afraid you’re going to break them, and the people you don’t want to touch because you’re afraid they’ll break you.” These stories] conjure struggles for connection in grimly surreal alternative realities that recall the probing comic imaginings of George Saunders.” — Los Angeles Times

short stories – vignettes that point out all the inherent contradictions in the complex world of love and dating (For example: 3. “You’re not like other girls,'” he said to every girl.) another little bitty comedic interlude of a story. it’s that thing when you’re meeting someone for dinner but you’re hungry NOW and you shove whatever’s handy into your face to tide you over and it’s not that you don’t enjoy the eating of it but you’re really ready for dinner to happen. In “Salted Circus Cashews, Swear to God,” a woman goes on a first date with a man. The date goes well, but then the man gives the woman a can of cashews. The long label on the can makes many unconvincing claims that it is not actually a prank filled with spring-loaded rubber snakes. But here I was, sitting in my childhood bedroom with a guitar. The Up-and-comers were over and done with and it was just Lizzy and me and it was the afternoon and it was summer in Tulsa and Lizzy was lying on my bed, looking as calm and beautiful as I had ever seen her, and she was asking me to play her something I had written.You remember standing next to Boris and reading the fish tank placard. You would have thought there’d be more to say to each other this night before you said good-bye forever, but it turns out you’d already said everything. So instead of going through it all again, you stood side by side in the silence of the ferry building and read the information at the base of the fish tank. And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you’re confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live. So you might as well be brave.” The stories are clever and fun but always with lots of heart, and sometimes with some lovely writing: It’s okay,” said Debbie. “You know, I used to be super-bummed, but the truth is you can get over anything with enough time. That was the other part of the idea behind the watch, the first part being the thing about you not having to look at your phone. The other part was so that you could remember that time was passing. For most things, really, the only thing to do is just let there be time.” Rules for Taboo – when game night is both a literal poor choice and a metaphor for poor real-life choices