Pretty

Loss. Illness. Addiction. Bad sex. Spooky offspring. Dry skin. Inexplicable hope. Twelve pretty stories of decidedly unpretty lives… Kearney comes to Exile with the same truly wicked, in-your-face street-smart wisdom of Zoe Whittall and Lisa Foad. In this follow-up to his acclaimed debut story collection, Mommy Daddy Baby, Greg Kearney continues his investigation into the lives of average people forced to modify their world views in the face of devastating – or at the very least, mortifying – new circumstances.

A middle-aged, HIV+ gay man, deformed by the side effects of protease inhibitors, wades cautiously back into the singles scene, a scene now rife with flip, canny young men who think nothing of ripping an ugly stranger to shreds by way of small talk. A fundamentalist Christian housewife thrills to her new-found carnality with a seasoned, secret lover, only to be saddled with the sudden, enervating task of home-schooling her four special-needs children.

A washed-up but content pop star is pursued by a pair of shrill documentary filmmakers, heedless of her happiness and hell-bent on refashioning the woman’s life into arty tragedy, even if it kills them. All of them. Mordant, brash, hysterically funny yet always compassionate, these new stories give voice to characters moved to speak in spite of themselves. Good breeding falls away and all things dank and scatological are pondered, embraced or discarded.