We Want What We Want
Stories
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An Esquire Best Book of Summer • A collection of glittering, surprising, darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives—from the award-winning author of Dual Citizens, who is "spoken of in the same reverent breath as Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams" (Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock).
In the mordantly funny "Money, Geography, Youth," Vanessa arrives home from a gap year volunteering in Ghana to find that her father is engaged to her childhood best friend. Unable to reconcile the girl she went to dances with in the eighth grade and the woman in her father's bed, Vanessa turns to a different old friendship for her own, unique diversion.
In the subversive "The Brooks Brothers Guru," Amanda drives to upstate New York to rescue her gawky cousin from a cult, only to discover clean-cut, well-dressed men living in a beautiful home, discussing the classics, and drinking sophisticated cocktails, moving her to wonder what freedoms she might willingly trade away for a life of such elegant comfort.
And in "The Universal Particular," Tamar welcomes her husband's young stepcousin into their home, imagining they are saving this young woman from Somalia by way of Stockholm, only to find their cool suburban life of potlucks and air-conditioning knocked askew in ways they cannot quite understand.
Populated with imperfect families, burned potential, and inescapable old flames, the thirteen stories in We Want What We Want are, each one, diamond-sharp—sparkling with pain, humor, and beauty.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Life is full of decisions, and sometimes the wrong ones are just too tempting to resist. In these 13 short stories, Alix Ohlin—author of wonderful novels like Dual Citizens—shows off her razor-sharp and wickedly dark sense of humor. In “The Brooks Brothers Guru,” a woman attempts to rescue her cousin from a materialistic religious cult, only to be seduced into joining herself. In “The Point of No Return,” a vaguely sexual friendship between two women gets even more emotionally complicated years later when one of them gets engaged to the other’s father. Each of Ohlin’s richly detailed stories sparkles with vividly descriptive language, subtle observations about human nature, and clever plot twists. The more mistakes her lovable characters make, the more we identify with them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ohlin (Dual Citizens) delivers another rich collection full of insights and sticky contradictions. In "The Brooks Brothers Guru," Amanda is recruited to rescue her long-lost cousin by his girlfriend, from a possible cult in Upstate New York. While there, Amanda, who spends much of her life on various devices, begins to understand the appeal of her cousin's quiet new life. "The Point of No Return" follows Bridget from her 20s into middle age as she views her life at a distance, seeing herself as "a tiny animal she had happened upon by chance one day and decided to raise." The strongest stories feature connected characters, such as "The Universal Particular," told by a Swedish-Somalian orphan, a beard blogger, a gamer, and a massage therapist as each longs to break out of their isolation. Ohlin also does a great job capturing her characters' perspectives on life. As Bridget in "The Point of No Return" begins to understand, sometimes one's 20s are a "performance of adulthood," while Tamar in "The Universal Particular" imagines telling her husband, during a fight, that adulthood requires one "to embody a role and not be able to escape it." Throughout, Ohlin reveals the depth of her characters with empathy and precision. The strongest stories are more than worth the price of admission.
