Daddy: Stories (Random House Large Print)

Product Description From the bestselling author of The Girls comes a “brilliant” (The New York Times) story collection exploring the dark corners of human experience.“Daddy’s ten masterful, provocative stories confirm that Cline is a staggering talent.”—Esquire NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLYAn absentee father collects his son from boarding school after a shocking act of violence. A nanny to a celebrity family hides out in Laurel Canyon in the aftermath of a tabloid scandal. A young woman sells her underwear to strangers. A notorious guest arrives at a placid, not-quite rehab in the Southwest.In ten remarkable stories, Emma Cline portrays moments when the ordinary is disturbed, when daily life buckles, revealing the perversity and violence pulsing under the surface. She explores characters navigating the edge, the limits of themselves and those around them: power dynamics in families, in relationships, the distance between their true and false selves. They want connection, but what they provoke is often closer to self-sabotage. What are the costs of one’s choices? Of the moments when we act, or fail to act? These complexities are at the heart of Daddy, Emma Cline’s sharp-eyed illumination of the contrary impulses that animate our inner lives. Review “Daddy approaches questions about power and connivance from a flurry of different angles. . . . [Cline] comes for the king and she doesn’t miss.”—Los Angeles Times“Brilliant, dark . . . Cline’s fiction is full of binaries pressing up against one another: youthful promise and life’s realities; success and failure; darkness and humor; external beauty and internal rot.”—Wall Street Journal “Cline is an astonishingly gifted stylist, but it is her piercing understanding of modern humiliation that makes these stories vibrate with life. . . . Brilliant.”—The New York Times “Cline is a master of fiction that wallows in the heavy weight of the unsaid, with perversion and darkness simmering beneath her characters’ tightly controlled surfaces. Daddy’s ten masterful, provocative stories confirm that Cline is a staggering talent.”—Esquire “A hair-raising collection of short fiction that at once discomfits and titillates, delineating the various ways women and men wrestle with the male gaze.”—O Magazine“Cline’s sharply drawn characters are the cowed, contemplative survivors of self-inflicted trauma, both seismic and quotidian. . . . Cline writes with such grace and precision that every sentence is a joy to absorb.”—LitHub“Daddy is a striking achievement, the assured work of a young writer with talent to burn.”—The Boston Globe “The payoffs are as gratifying as they are shattering.”—Publishers Weekly “Scintillating . . . This is a technically perfect book.”—New York “Cline’s stories constitute a riveting, timely tapestry of realizations, motivations, and desires.”—Booklist About the Author Emma Cline is the author of The Girls, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and the John Leonard Award from the National Book Critics Circle. She received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. She is from Northern California. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. What Can You Do with a GeneralLinda was inside, on her phone—­to who, this early? From the hot tub, John watched her pace in her robe and an old swimsuit in a faded tropical print that probably belonged to one of the girls. It was nice to drift a little in the water, to glide to the other side of the tub, holding his coffee above the waterline, the jets churning away. The fig tree was bare, had been for a month now, but the persimmon trees were full. The kids should bake cookies when they get here, he thought, persimmon cookies. Wasn’t that what Linda used to make, when the kids were little? Or what else—­jam, maybe? All this fruit going to waste, it was disgus