The People Who Report More Stress
Stories
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A Best Book of 2023 - Publisher's Weekly, Electric Literature, Chicago Public Library
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 STORY PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
"Alejandro Varela’s The People Who Report More Stress: Stories is a master class in analyzing the unspoken." —The New York Times
"A searing collection about gentrification, racism, and sexuality." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of interconnected stories brimming with the anxieties of people who retreat into themselves while living in the margins, acutely aware of the stresses that modern life takes upon the body and the body politic.
In “Midtown-West Side Story,” Álvaro, a restaurant worker struggling to support his family, begins selling high-end designer clothes to his co-workers, friends, neighbors, and the restaurant’s regulars in preparation for a move to the suburbs.
“The Man in 512” tracks Manny, the childcare worker for a Swedish family, as he observes the comings and goings of an affluent co-op building, all the while teaching the children Spanish through Selena’s music catalog.
“Comrades” follows a queer man with radical politics who just ended a long-term relationship and is now on the hunt for a life partner. With little tolerance for political moderates, his series of speed dates devolve into awkward confrontations that leave him wondering if his approach is the correct one.
A collection of humorous, sexy, and highly neurotic tales about parenting, long-term relationships, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict from the author of the National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon, The People Who Report More Stress deftly and poignantly expresses the frustration of knowing the problems and solutions to our society’s inequities but being unable to do anything about them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Varela follows up The Town of Babylon, a finalist for the National Book Award, with a searing collection about gentrification, racism, and sexuality. In "An Other Man," a queer Latinx man, restless in his relationship, gets permission from his partner to use dating apps. In "She and Her Kid, Me and Mine," a Salvadorian Columbian father deals with a series of microaggressions during his son's playdate with a classmate, whose white mother denigrates his parenting skills and pays his small apartment a backhanded compliment, one that stings especially as the mother is part of a wave of gentrifiers in their Brooklyn neighborhood. Slights also figure into "The Great Potato Famine," in which the Latinx narrator struggles to hail a cab in Midtown until his white boyfriend steps in. "Midtown-West Side Story" features a Latinx couple who, hoping to buy a house in the suburbs and send their kids to Catholic school, supplement their meagre income from service jobs with a side hustle fencing stolen luxury clothing. Many of the atmospheric entries sting with a quick one-two, with Varela following up an unsettling racist encounter with wry commentary (after the narrator of "The Great Potato Famine" gets into a white cabbie's car, he reflects on the driver's icy manner: "This is what you get for leapfrogging someone in the hierarchy, for inverting the power dynamic"). Throughout, Varela provides invaluable insight on the ways stress impacts the characters' lives, and how they persevere. Readers will be floored.
