Man V. Nature: Stories, by Diane Cook
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Man V. Nature: Stories, by Diane Cook
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San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of the Year
Boston Globe’s “Best Fiction of 2014”
Roxane Gay’s Top Ten Books of the Year
An Amazon Best Short Story Collection of 2014
An iBook Best of 2014
A refreshingly imaginative, daring debut collection of stories which illuminates with audacious wit the complexity of human behavior, as seen through the lens of the natural world.
Told with perfect rhythm and unyielding brutality, these stories expose unsuspecting men and women to the realities of nature, the primal instincts of man, and the dark humor and heartbreak of our struggle to not only thrive, but survive. In “Girl on Girl,” a high school freshman goes to disturbing lengths to help an old friend. An insatiable temptress pursues the one man she can’t have in “Meteorologist Dave Santana.” And in the title story, a long fraught friendship comes undone when three buddies get impossibly lost on a lake it is impossible to get lost on. In Diane Cook’s perilous worlds, the quotidian surface conceals an unexpected surreality that illuminates different facets of our curious, troubling, and bewildering behavior.
Other stories explore situations pulled directly from the wild, imposing on human lives the danger, tension, and precariousness of the natural world: a pack of not-needed boys take refuge in a murky forest and compete against each other for their next meal; an alpha male is pursued through city streets by murderous rivals and desirous women; helpless newborns are snatched by a man who stalks them from their suburban yards. Through these characters Cook asks: What is at the root of our most heartless, selfish impulses? Why are people drawn together in such messy, complicated, needful ways? When the unexpected intrudes upon the routine, what do we discover about ourselves?
As entertaining as it is dangerous, this accomplished collection explores the boundary between the wild and the civilized, where nature acts as a catalyst for human drama and lays bare our vulnerabilities, fears, and desires.
Man V. Nature: Stories, by Diane Cook - Amazon Sales Rank: #216027 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-06
- Released on: 2015-10-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .65" w x 5.31" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Man V. Nature: Stories, by Diane Cook Review “Diane Cook’s writing is sharp, bawdy, bold and often hilarious. Her stories are refreshingly crude and her imagination is unbounded. Like her characters, Cook does what she wants. Her world is another universe, where people are wilder.” (Rebecca Curtis, author of TWENTY GRAND: AND OTHER TALES OF LOVE AND MONEY)“What I like most about these stories is that many of them are dispatches from the end of the world, and it turns out to be a surprisingly familiar place.” (Ira Glass, Host, "This American Life")“Diane Cook’s stories are like high-wattage bulbs strung across a sinister, dark land. Man V. Nature is equal parts dazzle and depth.” (Ramona Ausubel, author of No One is Here Except All of Us and A Guide to Being Born)“Man v. Nature is a knockout…every single story could make a great movie…‘Somebody’s Baby’ completely captures the crippling, animal-like vigilance of early motherhood. I had to put the book down and just sob, and I was thrilled at the same time, thinking: ‘It works! This medium really works!’” (Miranda July, New York Times Book Review)“This week, I have been reading the most astonishing book, MAN V. NATURE by Diane Cook. The stories are surreal, with the sharpest edge and in one way or another, each story reveals something raw and powerful about being human in a world where so little is in our control.” (Roxane Gay)“MAN V. NATURE is as close to experiencing a Picasso as literature can get: the worlds in Diane Cook’s impressive debut are bizarre, vertiginous, funny, pushed to the extreme-but just familiar enough in their nuances of the human condition to evoke an irresistible, around-the-corner reality.” (Tea Obreht, author of THE TIGER'S WIFE)“Man V. Nature could also be called Diane Cook V. The Challenges of Writing Fresh, Invigorating Fiction in Our Age. In the latter contest, Cook crushes. Here is a bold debut.” (Sam Lipsyte, author of HOME LAND)“Here’s a good rule: If Diane Cook wrote it, read it…Safety is tenuous, if not an illusion, in her thoughtful, unsettling, and darkly funny collection.” (Boston Globe)“This debut story collection takes the familiar narrative conflict and applies it to contemporary characters. The capriciousness of the natural world in Cook’s stories colors them with a Romantic, almost surreal light that fans of Megan Mayhew Bergman are sure to appreciate.” (Huffington Post, "Best Books of the Fall")“Masterful…Each darkly comic modern fable reveals our societal preoccupations -- with status, sex, motherhood, belonging -- for what they really are: thin veneers over our ever-present animal selves, ready to crack at the merest provocation. A book that’ll grab your attention and keep you thinking.” (Helene Wecker, author of THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI)“Lively, apocalypse-tinged tales…Cook mines the moments that precede the losses-when the battles are truly raging-and it’s in them that she finds great beauty and strangeness…And, in the end, this collection suggests, meaning might be worth the battle.” (New York Times Book Review)“[Cook] puts forth idiosyncratic and twisted conceits, but delivers the narrative goods when it comes to depicting the tragic, emotional lives of her characters… Like the best kind of fiction, the reader is left with much to think about within the broad realms of sex, death, love and friendship.” (San Francisco Chronicle)“A dark pleasure...In ‘Meteorologist Dave Santana’ sex happens less often than the desperate, older woman (the meteorologist’s neighbor) would like. Cook is a young woman imagining an older woman’s need, and not charitably. But if Cook is anything like me, that desperate neighbor is herself. I’ve never really felt young.” (Miranda July, Goodreads "Good Minds Suggest")“Masterly.” (New York Times "Paperback Row")“Seethes with heat, rejection and twisted perception…I found myself enthralled by all of the stories in this collection. Not only are they surprising, but also fresh, funny, sad, often surreal and oddly true.” (Omnivoracious)“Quirkiness abounds, with several fairy-tale tropes thrown in for good measure...Some stories jump off the page...all are oddly charming.” (Publishers Weekly)“I couldn’t pry myself away from MAN V. NATURE . . . The stories are grim, violent, and darkly funny, but never so far removed from our most human urges to seem TOTALLY implausible.” (Buzzfeed, "5 Great Books to Read in December")“Potent and unnerving…stark spookiness in the vein of Shirley Jackson and William Golding…[and] a lonely weirdness like that of Aimee Bender and George Saunders…Cook writes assuredly of archetypal terror and even more insightfully of hunger-for food, friendship, love, and above all, survival. A canny, refined, and reverberating debut.” (Donna Seaman, Booklist)“Hunger, despair, and perpetual awe for the collapsing natural world and the vulnerability of existence therein. Apply liberally before exposure to the elements. Contents include truth and other known allergens.” (Flavorwire, "28 Feminist Writers Recommend Books Every Man Should Read")“This past month I discovered Diane Cook and had many moments of story-delight, really just too many to count, because Diane Cook is that good. . . . Cook’s writing is lively and frank.” (Impose Magazine)“MAN V. NATURE may be Diane Cook’s first book, but the former “This American Life” producer’s work is impressively precocious--making it our favorite short-story collection of October.” (GQ)“Irresistible reading...The author probes her characters’ psychological depths in weird and wonderful ways...With MAN V. NATURE Cook makes a bold, original debut.” (San Jose Mercury News)“Beautifully written dystopian short story collection.” (Jezebel)“When people ask me the desert island question, I usually say this is the book I’d bring...Her stories about survival amid the brutalities of nature are bracing primers for the apocalypse. (San Francisco Weekly, "10 Bay Area Women You Should Read Now")
From the Back Cover
A Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle "Best Book of the Year"
Told with perfect rhythm and unyielding brutality, these stories expose unsuspecting men and women to the realities of nature, the primal instincts of man, and the dark humor and heartbreak of our struggle to not only thrive but also survive. In "Girl on Girl," a high school freshman goes to disturbing lengths to help an old friend. An insatiable temptress pursues the one man she can't have in "Meteorologist Dave Santana." And in the title story, a long-fraught friendship comes undone when three buddies get impossibly lost on a lake it is impossible to get lost on. Other stories explore situations pulled directly from the wild, imposing on human lives the danger, tension, and precariousness of the natural world.
As entertaining as it is dangerous, this accomplished collection explores the boundary between the wild and the civilized, where nature acts as a catalyst for human drama and lays bare our vulnerabilities, fears, and desires.
About the Author
Diane Cook's fiction has been published in Harper's Magazine, Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope, One Story, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Teaching Fellow. She lives in Oakland, California.
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Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful. Supremely imaginative and very dark literary fiction By Daffy Du Man v. Nature is a collection of short stories so imaginative and so beautifully written that I honestly can't say I've ever read anything quite like them. At the same time, they are so bleak and dystopian that at times I was tempted to stop reading. Not exactly what I wanted before bedtime!Each story is a fully realized depiction of a strange, even surreal world that bears considerable resemblance to ours...refracted through a nightmare. A flooded town where only a few lucky neighbors still live in their homes, one embracing all the displaced, the other spurning them entirely. Three friends who are stranded in the middle of a lake and one discovers that his friendship with the other two was a farce. A woman who's obsessed with her neighbor, a TV weatherman. A violent city where the streets are peopled by marauding gangs and a family tried to survive with a child who quickly grows outlandishly large. A woman whose good fortune attracts hordes of people to her home until she has no privacy, no life except caring for their needs. And perhaps the most disturbing, a world where the state declares certain ten-year-old boys "not needed" and takes them away to be incinerated...unless they escape.Man v. Nature is a dark, dark book--the kind where it's hard to stop reading even as you're profoundly disturbed by what's on the page. It's that darkness that prompted me to deduct a star. This is literary fiction--make no mistake--but there is an undercurrent of brutality, where the unthinkable--and unimaginable--are commonplace and ordinary people find themselves carried along a tide transporting them to strange, untimely ends.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful. Captivating collection By Amazon Customer I read Diane Cook's short story "Bounty" in Harper's magazine and was intrigued, so I picked this up, her first collection of stories ("Bounty" was retitled "The Way the End of Days Should Be" for this collection).Cook said in an interview "I like thinking about the ways that people are still animals -- possess animal...ways but also try to hide and deny that lineage with civilization, rules, structures, rational thinking." In the stories, civilization has broken down, or people have become cut off from it, or it has devolved in some way, and the characters respond in surprising, sometimes animal ways.The stories have an element of the surreal, but they are grounded in recognizable human behavior. "It's Coming," for example, takes place in a world where mass attacks are everyday occurrences, but it's also a darkly humorous send-up of office politics.The best stories, such as the title story and the two I've already mentioned, follow vivid characters through often unusual situations. The prose is succinct and the story flows seemingly effortlessly.I didn't love all the stories. In some, like "Somebody's Baby," the surrealism seems to take over the story, and what is revealed about the characters is less interesting than in other stories. But I appreciate that Cook is trying to do something different and interesting, and when she succeeds, the stories are captivating.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful. There's craft here, but the stories didn't engage me as I'd hoped they would By P. Mann The stories in this collection are characterized by the bizarre, almost in a science-fiction way. In the first story, "Moving On," the narrator's husband dies, so she is sent to a "women's shelter," which is, in the world of the story, a place where young, no longer married women go to forget about their husbands and perhaps be chosen by another man so that they can leave and resume married life. (There is also a men's shelter across the way.) In "Girl on Girl," a high-school frosh sees her former friend apparently being beaten in a school bathroom and tells teachers what has happened. But was the victim really a victim when she seemed to encourage the beating? And if it was a beating, why was it at the hands of the victim's friends? In "Marrying Up," the narrator goes through husbands rather quickly, first marrying for love, then marrying a stronger man, and then marrying a much stronger man. She needs to because the world "got bad," and her husbands go outside only to be attacked by hoards. Violence, it seems, is always right outside the front door. In "Flotsam," a woman with more than one male lover finds that every time she does laundry, children's clothes somehow appear amid her clothing.The other eight stories follow, to varying degrees, similar patterns.In general, I simply did not find the stories emotionally engaging. They seem like exercises in metaphor or allegory. In some, like "Moving On," I had the sense that there was an important point but that I simply couldn't see it. In others, like "Flotsam," I got the point pretty quickly but still failed to see why it needed to be made in the way it was.To be sure, I admired the craft in a few of the stories. But I found them somewhat cold and distant, and, taken as a whole, the book seemed to be much of the same from story to story. Had I read one, two, or three stories, I think I might have found them worth contemplating and studying. Then again, that's just my reaction. I love reading, especially love the short story form, and yet found myself curiously at a distance here.
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