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Spectacle: Stories Kindle Edition

3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 29 ratings

An inventive new collection from the author of Hydroplane and The End of Free Love

* A
San Francisco Chronicle, Complex, Flavorwire, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy and Slaughterhouse 90210 Best Book of the Year *

In these innovative linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. In the title story, a woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning "Cowboys." And in "Underthings," when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it an accident.
Spectacle bears witness to alarming and strange incidents: carnival rides and plane crashes, affairs spied through keyholes and amateur porn, vandalism and petty theft. These wounded women stand at the edge of disaster and risk it all to speak their sharpest secrets.

In lean, acrobatic prose, Susan Steinberg subverts assumptions about narrative and challenges conventional gender roles. She delivers insight with a fierce lyric intensity in sentences shorn of excessive sentiment or unnecessary ornament. By fusing style and story, Steinberg amplifies the connections between themes and characters so that each devastating revelation echoes throughout the collection. A vital and turbulent book from a distinctive voice,
Spectacle will break your heart, and then, before the last page is turned, will bind it up anew.
"Experimental but never opaque, Steinberg's stories seethe with real and imagined menace." —
Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In a voice that is both edgy and sardonic, and with a style that is spare and often unconventional, Steinberg links the experiences of young women contending with age-old problems of love, abandonment, grief, and destruction. “Superstar” rocks the collection’s opening in a tale of unrequited love gone wrong, while in the closing “Universal,” she demonstrates the consequences of confusing lust for love. In between, Steinberg tackles the death of an unloved parent in “Cowboys” and “Cowgirl” and presents the degradation of domestic abuse in “Underthings.” None of these subjects make for easy reading, but in Steinberg’s agile hands, the potent telling is more than worth the potential discomfort. Steinberg’s heroines are a fiercely introspective and reflexively bold lot, and their personal dilemmas are vibrantly communicated through narratives delivered with both staccato briskness and stream-of-consciousness languor. As they stagger helplessly through gritty urban landscapes or dance exuberantly past stealthy emotional minefields, Steinberg’s women offer an idiosyncratic yet thoroughly recognizable take on contemporary relationships. --Carol Haggas

Review

“In pithy, rhythmic sentences that sound like biting poetry, Steinberg's all-female narrators tell stories of loss, abandonment, failure to love, and failure to 'perform' in the ways the people in their lives expect them to.” ―Page-Turner, the blog of The New Yorker, "Books to Watch Out For"

“[Steinberg] takes bold risks, exploring the boundaries of narrative and the possibilities of language and syntax. . . Steinberg's prose is rhythmic, hypnotic--teasing out confessions and revelations in stream-of-consciousness language. . . .
Spectacle is a marvel.” ―San Francisco Chronicle

“Readers of Lydia Davis and Anne Carson will welcome Steinberg's spare, innovative prose imbued with the cadence of verse. Rendered with formal originality, these hard-to-put-down stories explore the wounds that turn desire for love into performance art. This is a vulnerable book, gorgeously attending to grief, to lust, courageously bearing witness to all of life's deprave and human spectacles.” ―
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“Written with a sparse and grim tone, Steinberg's stories all have individual rhythms, and call to mind Lydia Davis trimming down Denis Johnson's
Jesus' Son.” ―Flavorwire, "The 10 Best Short Story Collections of 2013"

“What makes Susan Steinberg's story collection so refreshing is how concentrated the prose feels. Every sentence feels loaded, almost like a line of poetry.” ―
Complex, "The Best Books of 2013"

“[A] linked-story extravaganza. . . . [A] devastating cluster of uncompromising, funny, and eye-opening stories about women trapped in a male-centered world.” ―
Village Voice

“Both [Steinberg's] characters and [her] narratives store meaning in the spaces between the conventions, where the silence of a line break or an unspoken thought speaks volumes. At once vibrant and violent,
Spectacle takes on unexpected territory and reveals it is all too familiar. . . . Deeply illuminating.” ―Shelf Awareness for Readers

“Narrated entirely by women whose voices merge, divide, recur, and dissipate into one another, [
Spectacle feels] novelistic in scope and ambition. Steinberg is a maestro of stylistic innovation, conducting orbits of narrative and motif, coaxing meaning and music from each line. . . . With its literary inventions and sharp storytelling, this is a masterpiece of contemporary short fiction.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00AQUTNO8
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Graywolf Press (January 8, 2013)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 8, 2013
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 203 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 116 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 29 ratings

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
29 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2024
    Many of the stories are one sentence paragraphs and propel themselves. A great energy. See "Universal" and "Spectacle" and "Signifier".
    This author takes risks and heightens the stakes. I like her!
  • Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2013
    This was my first reading of Susan Steinberg and I am very impressed! The stories have beautiful structure and it makes you love to read, and then re-read her stories to see how she moves them around. My favorite structure of hers is the few stories that start with a semicolon and end with one, creating her story in one entire sentence. It makes her stories more fun!

    Each narrator is unique and tells a unique story and I find each story holds something everyone can relate to.

    I would recommend this book to anyone!
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2013
    No really, unless you consider being drunk, stoned and sleeping around being a strong woman who overcomes the sadness, obstacles or headships in life. Every story is the same ... pills, booze, unknown or slightly known men, life stinks. Locations, times, ages, may be different. Read one and you've read them all and you may still be wondering, as I did, what is this all about.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2013
    experimental, stream of consciousness, unique way of telling a story, using featuring damaged heroine in distress over family dysfunction, what she should and shouldn't have done in the past, old wounds.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2014
    This book is a game-changer.
    For most serious writers, there will be how they wrote before reading 'Spectacle', and how they wrote after. It's that original.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2013
    liked the narrative style but any writer these days who resorts to the "proverbial" this or that... i just assumed that went out of style in the double-odds. you'd think an MFA grad would know better. kinda lazy.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2013
    Language was vulgar, no story, boring.The poems were just random musings and made absolutely no sense.This type of writing is right up there with rap music and appeals to a different type of audience
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2014
    This collection of short fiction is STUNNING! Each story is its own wonderful hybrid of poetry and prose.

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