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Product Info

Publisher: Vintage

Author: Nada Alic

ISBN: 9780593466636

Year: 2022

Format: Paperback

Short stories

Bad Thoughts by
Nada Alic

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$ 300.00 mxn

Bad Thoughts by

Nada Alic

Reviews

"Some of the stories are dark and unsettling, while others are delightfully ridiculous. But throughout, Alic's deeply funny voice carries us through the total absurdity of today's world."

The Cut

Summary

An exhilarating and delightfully deviant debut story collection that, with comedic precision and compulsive irreverence, explores the most surreal and inadmissible fantasies of contemporary women.

Nada Alic's women--the perverts, nobodies, reality TV stars, poetic hopefuls, shameless party girls, and self-help addicts of Los Angeles and its environs--are all wrestling with a shared stark reality: the modern world. To cope, they live in their baddest thoughts: the lush, strange landscape of female make-believe.

In "Earth to Lydia," a support group meets to enjoy earthly pleasures after achieving too much enlightenment, engaging in bizarre exercises that escalate to a point of violence and fear. The narrator of Ghost Baby--the spirit of a proto-child assigned to a couple whose chemistry is waning--writhes in disembodied frustration as its parents fail to conceive it. In "Daddy's Girl," the daughter of Eastern European immigrants tries to connect to her distant and difficult father through the invention of increasingly elaborate home maintenance repairs. And in "The Intruder," a lonely woman's break-in fantasy quickly builds to a full-blown obsession, until she finds an unwitting partner with whom to act it out.

Though each of Alic's characters thrive and ache in different circumstances, they all grapple with the most painful equations of modern life: love, trust, power, loneliness, desire, violation, and vengeance. And she conjures them all with a voice that is instantly arresting, unexpectedly hilarious, and absolutely unforgettable.

“To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

John Steinbeck

“I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see.”

Nan Shepard

“What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.”

Elena Ferrante

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

George Orwell

“How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.”

Kate Grenville