Selected Blackouts

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In the stories that make up "Selected Blackouts", characters struggle with questions of faith, diet, sex, addiction, mortality, while often on the verge of -- or in the midst of -- cracking up: A cooking show host, for example, breaks down after a guest on his show refuses to eat barbecued pork spare ribs ("Emperor 'Q"), a young man starts to unravel, while drinking with friends at Christmastime, believing that they all know embarrassing secrets about him and one another ("How Much Do They Know?"), in between reading chapters of a stop-smoking self-help book ("Smoking"), a man fights with his live-in partner as he confronts the panic-inducing void left in place of his former habit, teenage boys auto-asphyxiate themselves as a means of entertainment and escape ("Blackout I") and then later steal a generator from their drug dealer during a cross-continental power-outage and possible terrorist attack ("Blackout II"). Although the stories in this collection experiment with form, they humorously return again and again to universal themes such as desperation, loneliness, jealousy, alienation, shame, and apocalypse.