num_pages: 200
description: For more than ten years Deb Olin Unferth has been publishing startlingly askew wickedly comic cutting-edge fiction in magazines such as Granta Harpers Magazine McSweeneys NOON and The Paris Review. Her stories are revered by some of the best American writers of our day but until now there has been no stand-alone collection of her short fiction.Wait Till You See Me Dance consists of several extraordinary longer stories as well as a selection of intoxicating very short stories. In the chilling The First Full Thought of Her Life a shooter gets in position while a young girl climbs a sand dune. In Voltaire Night students compete to tell a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. In Stay Where You Are two oblivious travelers in Central America are kidnapped by a gunman they assume to be an insurgentbut the gunman has his own problems.An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable and lighthearted but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal in terrifying clarity the rage despair and profound mournfulness that have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality a quality that is reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme Lorrie Moore and George Saunders but in Unferths unforgettable collection she carves out territory that is entirely her own.
language: English
title: Wait Till You See Me Dance
publisher: Graywolf Press