STEPHEN O'CONNOR / Here Comes Another Lesson

In what reality do a Minotaur, an Iraq War vet, and a Professor of Atheism coexist? Stephen O’Connor, whose fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Partisan Review, and The Quarterly, brings these disparate characters and many more together in Here Comes Another Lesson, a surprising and haunting collection ranging from the wildly inventive to the vividly realistic.

O’Connor’s protagonists are all, in one way or another, idealists who cannot live according to their own ideals. They yearn for love and fulfillment, often against fantastical, semi-apocalyptic backdrops whose strangeness only serves to make these lives more familiar and deeply affecting. Reminiscent of George Saunders, David Mitchell, and Haruki Murakami, O’Connor’s short stories showcase a vibrant literary talent. The New York Times Book Review wrote that his previous collection, Rescue, had “a sense of wandering reality [that] pervades most of the startlingly inventive stories.”

In the story “Ziggurat” (which ran in The New Yorker in June 2009), the Minotaur -- the agent of all in life that is indifferent to human wishes -- is awakened to his own humanity by a computer-game-playing “new girl” who has been brought to him for supper, and then has to deal with the consequences of his own actions. In “White Fire,” the protagonist longs for the ordinary life as husband and father after he returns from the National Guard in Iraq. In “The Professor of Atheism,” the title character has his beliefs challenged when he finds himself in Paradise -- where people are granted their every wish and frolic naked without shame -- but comes to learn that the place has a dark side not far from its opposite.

Here Comes Another Lesson is a compulsively readable celebration of human hopefulness and a profound lament to a sane and gentle world that cannot exist.

Stephen O’Connor is the author of three previous books: Rescue short fiction and poetry), Will My Name Be Shouted Out? (memoir and social analysis), and Orphan Trains (narrative history). His fiction, poetry, and journalism have appeared in The New England Review, Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. O’Connor is the recipient of the Cornell Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing from Columbia University, the Visiting Fellowship for Historical Research by Artists and Writers from the American Antiquarian Society, and the DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. He has received a BA from Columbia University and an MA from the University of California at Berkeley, both in English Literature. He currently teaches at the MFA programs of Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence, and lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

Here Comes Another Lesson: Stories (Paperback)

By Stephen O'connor

$15.00

ISBN-13: 9781439181997
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Free Press, 8/2010

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