We Live in Water: Stories
ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019
From the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, the first collection of short fiction from Jess Walter--a suite of diverse and searching stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit, keen eye, and generosity of spirit that has made him a bookseller and reader favorite
These twelve stories--published over the last five years in Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Playboy, and other publications--veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.
We Live in Water is a darkly comic, heartfelt collection of stories from a "ridiculously talented writer" (New York Times), "one of the freshest voices in American literature" (Dallas Morning News).
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Community Reviews
This book is a collection of short stories, mostly set in and around Spokane (where the author lives) and the dark underbelly of society, the forgotten ones. There's some dark humor here, in the midst of some sad, desolate stories, where you know the situation is hopeless and there's nowhere to go but down even further. But even knowing this, you still want to keep reading because he somehow pulls you in and makes you care about these hapless souls, and how their stories relate to the world at large and society as a whole.
I definitely don't want to go back to Spokane though.
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