Abstract

Smoking and Six Other Stories comprises short fiction of various sorts: short shorts ("Odin Létourneau and Debbie Siskind's Second Date" and "Conversation at Four a.m."), longer stories ("Easter Weekend" and "The Sit"), a television cooking show transcript ("Emperor 'Q"), an interior monologue ("How Much Do They Know?"), and a story about a man reading a stop-smoking self-help book, while fighting with his partner ("Smoking"). These stories contain characters struggling with questions of faith, diet, sex, addiction, mortality, while often on the verge of---or in the midst of---cracking up. In "Emperor 'Q," for example, a cooking show host breaks down after a guest on his show refuses to eat barbequed pork spareribs. In "How Much Do They Know?," too, a young man starts to unravel, while drinking with friends at Christmastime, believing that they know secrets about him. Desperation, discomfort, loneliness, jealousy, and shame are some of the other themes explored in this collection. The stories are set in rural, urban, and tropical locales. Although the stories in this collection experiment with form, they return again and again to similar themes.