An otherworldly short story collection that shines “a glaring light on the complexities of human personality and family relationships” (Kirkus Reviews).
“Paul Griner is a daredevil storyteller. . . . Anyone who cares about the short story—or just loves good writing—should make a beeline for this remarkable collection.” —Tom Perotta, author of The Leftovers
The stories in Hurry Please I Want to Know invite urgent curiosity as Paul Griner spins between quotidian worlds infused with the foreign and the familiar. A man brings his mother back from the dead, only to find her most irritating quirk magnified. A low-ranking soldier is forced to milk a cow within enemy range. A cartoonist’s daughter waits each morning to see how her father’s mood dictates how he will draw her face. Grieving siblings wait to inherit one of their father’s physical features after his death . . .
Griner’s endings shift between the shocking and quiet. The result is a meditation on capturing the intangible, and the human fascination with realms that are not our own. Hurry Please I Want to Know gives us the sensation of falling into someone else’s world and an immediate future spent sorting out its thrilling peculiarities.
“Griner approaches everyday tragedies by building elaborate machines and shaky structures in the hope of creating a facsimile of life that might somehow become real . . . A pleasure.” —The New York Times
“Griner overlays tales of family, artistry, and parent-child relationships with elements of the surreal, in order to create, in the words of one character, ‘an undercurrent of mournfulness’.” —Publishers Weekly
“The writing is careful, precise, shocking—stylistically brilliant.” —Bobbie Ann Mason, author of The Girl in the Blue Beret