“Each fast-moving story presents a vivid sense of a California beyond the bright lights of Hollywood… Fans of Jennifer Egan will enjoy O’Connor’s depiction of angst and ennui in capitalist California.”
A Perfect Universe
Ten Stories
Description
Scott O’Connor’s novels have been hailed as “astonishing” (Library Journal), and “so insistently stirring, you want to lean in close to catch every word” (The New York Times Book Review). Now, from the author of Untouchable and Half World comes A Perfect Universe, a piercingly emotional cycle of stories in the tradition of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Annie Proulx’s Close Range.
Welcome to the often-overlooked corners of sun-bleached Los Angeles, where a teenaged bicycle thief searches for a kidnapped boy, a young musician emerges as the lone survivor of a building collapse, and an aging actor faces the erasure of his past. There, far from the Hollywood spotlight, we also meet two sisters locked in a destructive cycle of memory and illness, coffee-shop regulars whose lives are torn apart by a stunning moment of violence, and the desperate, fraudulent writer whose fictions connect these unforgettable characters in subtle and surprising ways.
Sharply observed, exhilaratingly paced, and beautifully written, A Perfect Universe is a masterful exploration of growing up and growing old, loss and longing, identity and deception, and the search for redemption, humanity, and grace.
Reviews
"The reader is immediately drawn in… as O'Connor shows, our vices are what make us so delicately and chaotically human. A catalog of imperfections neatly packaged within a book."
“A Perfect Universe beautifully encapsulates our contemporary world, in the miniature globe of Los Angeles. We see ourselves in these hustlers and hopefuls, strays and survivors, characters as complex, damaged, and determined as the city itself. This is a new classic—not only of the mysterious, evergreen pull of the City of Angels, but of American fiction at large.”
“I sat down to read the first story in A Perfect Universe, only to look up several hours later having read the entire book in a single sitting. I fell in love with these characters from the first page. The storytelling in this book—tender and attentive, starkly poetic and always surprising—moved me at every turn.”
