Description
Book SynopsisSet within the resilient Great Plains, these stories are marked by the region's people and landscape, and the distinctive way it is both regressive in its politics yet also stumbling toward something better. While not all stories are explicitly set in Oklahoma, the state is almost a character that is neither protagonist nor antagonist, but instead the weird next-door-neighbor you're perhaps too ashamed of to take anywhere. Who is the embarrassing one--you or Oklahoma? Dinah Cox lives in her hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she teaches in the English department at Oklahoma State University and is an associate editor at Cimarron Review.
Trade ReviewWinner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize "These stories quickly got me smiling, the Bobby Fuller Four's 'I Fought the Law' tingling in my head. Dinah Cox is locked up in the hot Oklahoma sun by Brooklyn juries and sentenced to busting rocks by Iowa City courts. But with Remarkable she is appealing to the other audience who knows common, ordinary people (even if gay), doomed to shit jobs and fast food, who live in the vast, western nowhere. Her characters read funny, as opposed to yawning earnest, and she tells of their pathos--in prose that's often close to poetry--with way too much fun to be roaming trial free." --Dagoberto Gilb "Dinah Cox's Remarkable is a book as gentle as a stiletto, as airy as an anvil. Cox observes a cast of misfits and oddballs with the sagacity we usually see only in the stories of Flannery O'Connor. Cox's characters are rendered via rapier-sharp wit, yet with profound pathos." --Toni Graham, author of The Suicide Club "Funny, disturbing, and unapologetically smart--the stories in Remarkable sneak into your heart and then break it. We meet Marcella who works at the Telephone Museum and hears imaginary conversations, and the B-movie star of Tumbleweed Town, a sort of Brokeback Mountain meets Deliverance meets The Monkees. The fictive people in this collection, iconoclasts of the Midwest, conjure their own idiosyncratic, surprisingly honest and tender worlds." --Nona Caspers, author of Heavier than Air: Stories, a NYTBR Editors' Choice "The stories in Cox's debut collection are as varied as they are sharp and surprising, venturing fearlessly into unexpected territory. The stories neither revere nor despise their Oklahoma setting, even as many of Cox's delightfully odd characters feel stuck there and dream of someday getting out." -- Publishers Weekly
Table of ContentsCONTENTS Three Small Town Stories~~~4 Adolescence in B Flat~~~9 Three Sad Stories~~~28 Old West Night~~~34 The Dot~~~51 Recipe for Disaster~~~65 Three Stories of Prosperity~~~85 Glue~~~91 Bun in the Oven~~~108 Remarkable~~~110 The Love Feast~~~121
