Inappropriate Behavior: Stories - Softcover

Farish, Murray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571311076 ISBN 13: 9781571311078

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2014

Synopsis

Short fiction about people on the edge that “masterfully balances the absurd, the horrific, and the humorous” (Booklist).

The characters in Inappropriate Behavior teeter on the brink of sanity, while those around them reach out in support, watch helplessly, or duck for cover. In their loneliness, they cast about for a way to connect, to be understood, though more often than not, things go horribly wrong. Some of the characters come from the darkest recesses of American history. In ‘Lubbock Is Not a Place of the Spirit,’ a Texas Tech student recognizable as John Hinckley, Jr. writes hundreds of songs for Jodie Foster as he grows increasingly estranged from reality. Other characters are recognizable only in the sense that their situations strike an emotional chord. The young couple in ‘The Thing About Norfolk,’ socially isolated after a cross-country move, are dismayed to find themselves unable to resist sexually deviant urges. And in the deeply touching title story, a couple stretched to their limit after the husband’s layoff struggle to care for their emotionally unbalanced young son. Set in cities across America and spanning the last half-century, this collection draws a bead on our national identity, distilling our obsessions, our hauntings, our universal predicament.

“Gripping and accomplished . . . These stories will be compared with works by Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson.” —Janet Peery, National Book Award finalist and author of The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs

About this title

About the Author

Murray Farish's short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Epoch, Roanoke Review, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. His work has been awarded the William Peden Prize, the Phoebe Fiction Prize, and the Donald Barthelme Memorial Fellowship Prize, among others. Farish lives with his wife and two sons in St. Louis, Missouri, where he teaches writing and literature at Webster University. Inappropriate Behavior is his debut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from the story, "Ready for Schmelling"

My name is Perkins, and my story begins on a Monday. Just as I was about to leave my desk after another day at the international corporation where I am employed, I happened to glance out the window to see a man crawling across the parking lot. I watched him as he crawled—hands and knees, attaché-handle in his teeth—from the front steps of the building all the way to the third row of cars, a good sixty yards or so, just like a baby in a blue business suit. When he got to his dark green Ford Taurus, the mid-level company car, he stood, took his attaché from his mouth, dusted himself off, got in and drove away in what I have to assume was the normal mode—seated, strapped in, ten-and-two—for a man of his age and station.

I had long ago quit wondering, or at least asking, about most of what went on at the I.C. I started there three years ago—just after Marcie and I got married, just before my father died—and I had seen more than enough corporate and individual doltishness, weirdness, and outright stupidity to make me seriously question the veracity of the yearly financial reports, which show us as a major player in the I.C. world. I had witnessed fiscal irresponsibility and massive waste offset by arbitrary niggling and concealed by necromantic accounting. I had narrowly escaped involvement in churlish turf wars. I had seen grown men and women reduced to paranoid hysterics by such matters as their table assignment at the company picnic or having their name left off a memo concerning this month’s coffee fund. I had learned that the single most important task one can master in business is that of assigning blame, and I had seen the best of the best ply their trade with such a profound lack of conscience that it would be debilitating in normal life. I was even there the day last March when Terrence McNeil—who never learned the corollary to the Most Important Task, that one must diligently avoid blame—came by to show some of his former co-workers in Vendor Support the business end of his Winchester side-by-side. But I had never seen a man in a blue suit crawl across a parking lot before.

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571311076
• ISBN 13: 9781571311078
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224