Author(s): Jen George

Short Stories

Fiction. Five stories several as long as novellas introduce the world to Jen George, a writer whose furiously imaginative new voice calls to mind Donald Barthelme and Leonora Carrington no less than Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. In "Guidance/The Party," an ethereal alcoholic "Guide" in robes and flowing hair appears to help a thirty- three-year-old woman prepare a party for her belated adulthood; "Take Care of Me Forever" tragically lambasts the medical profession as a ship of fools afloat in loneliness and narcissism; "Instruction" chronicles a season in an unconventional art school called The Warehouse, where students divide their time between orgies, art critiques, and burying dead racehorses. Combining slapstick, surrealism, erotica, and social criticism, Jen George's sprawling creative energy belies the secret precision and unexpected tenderness of everything she writes. "I had to judge a story contest of 600+ anonymous stories and I read each one and without hesitation Jen George's story was my favourite. I'm so happy this collection exists. I feel drunk with love for these stories. They're so funny and weird and true." Sheila Heti "Reading THE BABYSITTER AT REST is an immersion into a hidden world. It's a place which is at first recognizable, before it becomes completely warped. Jen George has a way of bending the narrative which is distinctly her own. Her stories are at once poignant and disciplined in their abstraction, and hilarious in their inappropriate and reckless abandon." Matthew Barney "With a weird, beautiful energy, George explores the challenges of woman-being: singlehood, self-doubt, motherhood, the dismaying fact of aging, the (dis)ability to love. A modern-day Jane Bowles, George engages these mysteries in prose that is funny, charming, dark, and insightful." Deb Olin Unferth"

The self-obsession bordering on narcissism which passes for purpose among thirty-something arty types who have not yet succumbed to despair or parenthood or both is here forensically explored in five longish stories with protagonists for whom the aspirations towards “self-fulfillment” (admit you also have these tendencies) are proving insufficiently resilient to masquerade as anything other than the self-indulgence tempered only by ennui that they always were (admit you also suffer from this). Maturing may be a liminal process but every doorstep is also a place to trip, and George's stories, although they suffer on occasion from the self-indulgence one would expect from their subject matter, exhibit the sort of stunned lyricism that results when your head hits the floor in mid-sentence (test this yourself). “Your life may fall apart may fall apart around you while you're putting on the act of radiating positivity, but you will not realise it for some time,” says The Guide in the story 'Guidance/The Party'.

{THOMAS}

>> Read the title story here.