Sorry Please Thank You - Stories

Zusatztext 53035497 Informationen zum Autor CHARLES YU  is the author of four books, including  Interior Chinatown  (the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for fiction), and the novel  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe  (a  New York Times  Notable Book and a  Time  magazine best book of the year). He received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series,  Westworld.  He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in  The New Yorker ,  The New York Times ,  The Wall Street Journal , and  Wired,  among other publications .  Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents. Klappentext The author of the widely praised debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories.Look for Charles Yu's new novel, Interior Chinatown, available in January. A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date . . . A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero? . . . A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: "Don't feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you." Drawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is a brilliant observer of contemporary society, and in Sorry Please Thank You he fills his stories with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and piercing insight into the human condition. He has already garnered comparisons to such masters as Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, and in this new collection we have resounding proof that he has arrived (via a wormhole in space-time) as a major new voice in American fiction. Standard Loneliness Package     Root canal is one fifty, give or take, depending on who’s doing it to you. A migraine is two hundred.   Not that I get the money. The company gets it. What I get is twelve dollars an hour, plus reimbursement for painkillers. Not that they work.   I feel pain for money. Other people’s pain. Physical, emotional, you name it.   Pain is an illusion, I know, and so is time, I know, I know. I know. The shift manager never stops reminding us. Doesn’t help, actually. Doesn’t help when you are on your third broken leg of the day.   ***   I get to work three minutes late and already there are nine tickets in my inbox. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, open the first ticket of the morning:   I’m at a funeral.   Feeling grief.   Someone else’s grief. Like wearing a stranger’s coat, still warm with heat from another body.   I’m feeling a mixture of things.   Grief, mostly, but also I detect some guilt in there. There usually is.   I hear crying.   I am seeing crying faces. Pretty faces. Crying, pretty, white faces. Nice clothes.   Our services aren’t cheap. As the shift manager is always reminding us. Need I remind you? That is his favorite phrase these days. He is always walking up and down the aisle tilting his head into our cubicles and saying it. Need I remind you, he says, of where we are on the spectrum? In terms of low-end high-end? We are solidly toward the highish end. So the faces are usually pretty, the clothes are usually nice. The people are usually nice, too. Although I imagine it’s not such a big deal to be nice when you’re that rich and that pretty.   There’s a place in Hyderabad doing what we’re doing, but a little more toward the budget end of things. Precision Living Solutions,...

Product details

• Authors: Charles Yu, Yu Charles
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 01.05.2013
• EAN: 9780307948465
• ISBN: 978-0-307-94846-5
• No. of pages: 240
• Dimensions: 134 mm x 206 mm x 21 mm
• Series: VINTAGE BOOKS; Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature