MY DATE WITH SATAN: Stories - Softcover

Richter, Stacey

3.81

380 ratings by Goodreads

9780684857015: MY DATE WITH SATAN: Stories

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684857014 ISBN 13: 9780684857015

Publisher: Scribner, 1999

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Combining compassionate grace with edgy satire, a collection of tales offering a clear-eyed, funny, and unsentimental view of American life and popular culture includes a dog who gains art world fame and a Cat Lady who loves a Rat Boy. A first collection. 12,500 first printing.

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Review:

Breathe a sigh of relief at the appearance of Stacey Richter, a hip, pop culture-obsessed fiction writer who actually knows what she's doing. A lot of "buzz" surrounds her first collection, My Date with Satan, and she was hailed by the Voice Literary Supplement as a "writer on the verge," but Richter is much more than the flavor of the month. Her prose bristles with humor and sadness, and her characters are true originals: an ex Teen Idol ("The Ocean"), a member of a Swedish heavy-metal band ("Goal 666"), a girl who desperately wants to be a Cat Lady ("Rats Eat Cats"). In this last story the 21-year-old narrator can't wait to get old in an apartment overtaken by felines:

I would constantly wear the same sweater, and maybe a synthetic wig. I'd have several litter boxes in my apartment, and this litter would be changed infrequently. I would receive either welfare or social security and spent most (if not all) of these public moneys on cat food.... Cat hair would be embedded in my sweater. It would almost appear that my sweater was made of cat hair.

Richter's characters are often pathetic or blind to themselves, but the author never condescends; writing solely in first person, she masterfully captures the private logic and language of her narrators. They are like messengers from an overlooked world, telling us stories we somehow need to know. In this way Richter reminds me of Eudora Welty, who also invested small, outcast characters with poetry, humor, grace. My Date with Satan establishes Richter as a talent to be reckoned with. She writes like a discoverer who has found the country she's been looking for. --Emily White

About the Author:

Stacey Richter received her MFA from Brown University. She won a Pushcart Prize for "The Beauty Treatment," originally published in The Mississippi Review, and a National Prize for Fiction for "The First Men." Also, her stories have appeared in GQ, Seventeen, Granta, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, LIT, and Nerve�. She lives in a pink bungalow in Tucson, Arizona, and writes regularly for The Tucson Weekly.

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