Large Animals in Everyday Life (Paperback, Revised)

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, these stories are quirky takes on contemporary life in which animals, not always large, lurk around the edges.
"I like animals and I like men" begins the hopelessly-in-love narrator of "The Round Bar," who follows her married country singer to Nashville in her own version of a down-and-out song. In "The Oysters," Pat Boone"not the Pat Boone"laments his love for his newly married professor, while delivering oysters to be irradiated. The oysters themselves are having a hard time deciding whether irradiation is a gain or a loss. Wendy Brenner triumphs in capturing all the normal oddities of life; and in the magic of a few words a bizarre but accurate images he creates our lives and how we live and breathe.

"Brenner's work is disturbed, taut, funny, and wise. Better than that it's good."--Padgett Powell

"Her prose is at times as moving and mean as broken bottles. . . . Brenner is a writer of large . . . talent."Diane Roberts, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wendy Brenner is a professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, New England Review, and other literary journals.

"Brenner's achievement in these ironic, understanding tales is making sure that even the small losses her characters suffer do not fail to move us."Polly Morrice, New York Times Book Review

"Intoxicatingly original."Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award