![]() But most of all, for a story about a time travel mechanic, it was unfailingly realistic. Overflowing with quasi-scientific jargon, the novel was exciting and funny and, at times, downright spooky, much like the quantum theories that Yu invoked. He took sci-fi theories and ran them through a sort of literary normalizer, applying ample wit, pop-culture references, psychological insight, metaphorical flair, and a vital sweetness (his young, isolated protagonist, in search of his father, even has a stray dog for a pet). ![]() In his first novel, How To Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe, Yu conceived of Minor Universe 31, a universe filled with people widely, albeit unhappily, using time machines. “What Charles Yu does very well-it is a long list, but this may be its most notable entry-is to create strange and disturbingly normal alternate realities. Alan Cheuse for NPR’s All Things Considered it makes for terrific reading for the heart as well as the head.” Experiment plus emotion, we don’t often find these two elements together, but when it happens, as it does in most of these stories. writer Charles Yu, has the title ‘Standard Loneliness Package’ and it announces that a sly, nimble fantasist with a speculative edge is at work here. ![]() The lead story in Sorry Please Thank You, this spritely new collection by L.A. “Lovely and heartfelt… A brilliantly manic ride…Yu has an undeniable gift for describing, in clean, economical prose, the mechanics of things that don’t exist or are impossible.” He has already garnered comparisons to such masters as Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, and in this new collection we have resounding proof that he has arrived (via a wormhole in space-time) as a major new voice in American fiction. A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: “Don’t feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you.”ĭrawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is a brilliant observer of contemporary society, and in Sorry Please Thank You he fills his stories with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and piercing insight into the human condition. A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero?. The author of the widely praised debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories.Ī big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date. ![]()
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