This Jealous Earth: Stories

Product DescriptionA man puts his beloved pets to the knife; a family prepares for the Rapture; a woman in a department store slips a necklace into her purse. Whatever the situation, the characters in This Jealous Earth: Stories find themselves faced with moments of decision that will forever alter the course of their lives. Always moving and often touched with humor, Carpenters stories examine the tension between the everyday and the transcendentour struggle to grasp what lies beyond our reach. Whether hawking body parts in a Midwestern city, orbiting through the galleries of a Paris museum or plotting sibling tortures in an Arizona desert, his characters lead us through a series of dilemmas of universal appeal. This Jealous Earth: Stories is the debut publication from MG Press, a Midwest based publisher.ReviewIn these tautly constructed, psychologically acute, and elegantly written stories, Scott Carpenter offers his reader dispatches from that strange realm we call everyday life. By turns sad, funny, tender, and alarming, *This Jealous Earth* examines the nuanced turns and shifts of human events and feelings that imbue the ordinary with the extraordinary.Siri Hustvedt, author of *What I Loved*, and *The Summer Without Men.*The 16 tales that form Carpenters agreeable debut collection thread together the familiar and the bizarre, and while not every story hits its intended mark, the volume offers enough surprise to remain engaging throughout. The comingofage Donny Donny, full of petty theft, xray specs, and dangerous neighbors, is charmingly nostalgic, while the metafictional correspondence between a man and a utility companys customer service representative, in Sincerely Yours, adds humor and absurdity. Overall, Carpenter achieves the greatest success in two stories concerning animals. The Tender Knife finds a man facing sadness and terror while culling his koi pond. And in Field Notes, a vacationing boy collects scorpions as his parents marriage crumbles. Carpenter sprinkles the collection with several flash fiction compositions, and these concise bursts of prose, particularly The Phrasebook and Future Perfect, spark interest.Publishers WeeklyCarpenter, though he usually writes in the third person, is very skilled at writing accurately in the voice of many, very different characters. He shifts easily from a shoplifting upperclass stayathome mother to an awkward middleaged tourist from Ohio lost in a European museum to a little girl distressed about the imminent loss of her older brother. He works to match language and syntax to each characters unique situation; this is clear in the very successful third section of the book. In The Death Button, a dark yet hilarious piece about an English major in love with his roommate, the narrator is selling his plasma to make money. He describes the seemingly alcoholic homeless man next to him at the center as a stunt double for Walt Whitmanexcept that his nose was veined with purple and the beard was clotted with what appeared to be bits of partially digested fettuccine. Carpenter takes full advantage of his narrators literary knowledge, to the delight of the storys readers.The pleasantly sarcastic tone of the narrator (seen in phrases such as a generous burp of which he shared and vomitous eruptions) further aids the reader in picturing this intelligent, insecure yet awkwardly cocky, and slightly, *cleverly* caricatured, hipster of a college student.Generally Carpenters writing is clear and delightful. I was especially tickled by one sentence that is, yet again, in The Death Button: The closet served as an echo chamber, the louvers leading to the lovers, tuning me in to their amplified antics while I lay halfenclosed in the hollow under my desk like some mournful crustacean.A.K. Mayhew, The Rumpus