The Unsettling

By Peter Rock

A stunning, Poe-esque collection of short fiction about outsiders, lost dogs, romance, and life’s surprising mysteries.

List Price: $21.00

Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam Cage (April 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1596921714

Book Description

A stunning, Poe-esque collection of short fiction about outsiders, lost dogs, romance, and life’s surprising mysteries.

Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the thirteen stories in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign.

A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker’s tale about a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a woman drives a Gold Firebird through the desert with a television playing “Rockford Files” reruns on the passenger seat; and a girl returns to her childhood home to spy on its new inhabitants, not realizing they are aware of her surveillance.

Told through Rock’s imaginative and wholly original voice, these are haunted tales about fascination, transformation, and the relationship between the two.

From the Inside Flap

"This book, which is maybe the best short story collection I’ve ever read, messed up my life. For days I wandered around thinking about the impossible stories and the everyday heartbreak that this collection brings, and everything I looked at seemed utterly and gorgeously rearranged by Peter Rock. Now it’s your turn." – Daniel Handler, author of the Lemony Snicket series.

"These thirteen stories are moving, funny, haunting and – what's best – uncanny in their power to linger, filled with memorable characters and vivid events that will shadow you long after you think you've finished the book. Peter Rock is one of the most talented writers around, and The Unsettling is an experience you don't want to miss." – Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing.

About the Author

Peter Rock grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of the novels The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves, and This Is the Place. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and recipient of a 2000 NEA Fellowship, he now lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches at Reed College.