Recensori in anteprimaBrian Booker

Seven palpably tense and exquisitely atmospheric stories of people confronting their innermost fears “Brian Booker’s stories contain a phantasmagorical hilarity, along with a headlong momentum that only accelerates as the stories’ events grow more dire. You can open this book to any page and will find there amazing events related in a deeply unsettling style. I don’t know of any writing quite like his. Are You Here for What I’m Here For? is a brilliant debut.” —Charles Baxter, author of The Soul Thief and There’s Something I Want You to Do “Like Kafka and W.G. Sebald, Booker’s theme is dislocation, as much from the physical world as from the world of others and of thought. The writing brims with intelligent detail, but always in the service of its characters—people striving for ‘new, uncharted places,’ reachable nowhere else but in these singular stories.” —Salvatore Scibona, author of The End The suspense creeps in and takes hold in this polished and lyrical debut about troubled characters grappling with rare illnesses, menacing chance encounters, sexual awakening, impending natural disasters, and New Age cults. Here, the everyday meets the uncanny as two high school friends go out for one unforgettable night. A boy, haunted by dreams of a catastrophic flood, becomes swept up in an encephalitis epidemic. A hypochondriac awaits her diagnosis at a Caribbean health resort. A disease researcher meets his nemesis on a train. A father searches for his missing son in a remote mountain lodge where nothing is quite as it seems. An elderly pharmacist protects his adopted nephew, who found a mermaid in a bottle, from a coastal village gripped by hysteria. A teenager is sent to a “therapeutic” boarding school with disturbing methods and is reunited with a staff member years later.