Large Animals in Everyday Life — Wendy Brenner

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, these stories are quirky takes on contemporary life in which animals, not always large, lurk around the edges. "I like animals and I like men" begins the hopelessly-in-love narrator of "The Round Bar," who follows her married country singer to Nashville in her own version of a down-and-out song. In "The Oysters," Pat Boone "not the Pat Boone" laments his love for his newly married professor, while delivering oysters to be irradiated. The oysters themselves are having a hard time deciding whether irradiation is a gain or a loss. Wendy Brenner triumphs in capturing all the normal oddities of life; and in the magic of a few words a bizarre but accurate images he creates our lives and how we live and breathe.