Large Animals in Everyday Life: Stories

The characters in Brenner's sharp, witty debut story collection-winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction-come out springing, with voices as stimulating as a blast of cold air in the freezer aisle of a Winn-Dixie. In her chosen world of revolving country music bars, dog tracks, hotel swimming pools and food irradiation plants, Brenner's band of misfits, loners and uncommon individuals cope with longing, loneliness and other pitfalls of late 20th-century life. In ""The Round Bar,"" a short, fat country singer in a tractor cap puts the moves on his sometime girlfriend while his wife and baby wait back home in the double-wide. Tiptoeing breathlessly out of her static, neatly organized life, the lonely brochure-stuffer of ""Success Story"" starts an affair with the hunky brother of the girl upstairs. An ""outraged, overeducated"" woman who dresses as a polar bear handing out ice cream cones in a supermarket has a run-in with the local supermodel in ""I Am the Bear."" Many of the protagonists are acutely observant, big-boned women who know their own minds but aren't quite sure what to make of those around them. ""Delicate, well-groomed men often treated me this way,"" one says. ""As though I were likely to breathe up all their air or just fall on them like a tree."" By turns determined and resigned, they find comfort in strange places: a fat neighbor's gentlemanly face; the memory of secretly recorded sex on an erased audiotape. Chock-full of pitch-perfect dialogue and dead-on descriptions. Brenner's stories, intoxicatingly original, are precise life studies that linger uncannily in the upper right-hand corner of the mind. Author tour. (May)