Man v. Nature

by Diane Cook

Overview

San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of the Year

Boston Globe’s “Best Fiction of 2014”

Roxane Gay’s Top Ten Books of the Year     

An Amazon Best Short Story Collection of 2014

An iBook Best of 2014  

A refreshingly imaginative, daring debut collection of stories which illuminates with audacious wit the complexity of human behavior, as seen through the lens of the natural world.

Told with perfect rhythm and unyielding brutality, these stories expose unsuspecting men and women to the realities of nature, the primal instincts of man, and the dark humor and heartbreak of our struggle to not only thrive, but survive. In “Girl on Girl,” a high school freshman goes to disturbing lengths to help an old friend. An insatiable temptress pursues the one man she can’t have in “Meteorologist Dave Santana.” And in the title story, a long fraught friendship comes undone when three buddies get impossibly lost on a lake it is impossible to get lost on. In Diane Cook’s perilous worlds, the quotidian surface conceals an unexpected surreality that illuminates different facets of our curious, troubling, and bewildering behavior.

Other stories explore situations pulled directly from the wild, imposing on human lives the danger, tension, and precariousness of the natural world: a pack of not-needed boys take refuge in a murky forest and compete against each other for their next meal; an alpha male is pursued through city streets by murderous rivals and desirous women; helpless newborns are snatched by a man who stalks them from their suburban yards. Through these characters Cook asks: What is at the root of our most heartless, selfish impulses? Why are people drawn together in such messy, complicated, needful ways? When the unexpected intrudes upon the routine, what do we discover about ourselves?

As entertaining as it is dangerous, this accomplished collection explores the boundary between the wild and the civilized, where nature acts as a catalyst for human drama and lays bare our vulnerabilities, fears, and desires.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062333100
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/07/2014
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Diane Cook's fiction has been published in Harper's Magazine, Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope, One Story, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Teaching Fellow. She lives in Oakland, California.

Editorial Reviews

…one of the fundamental concerns of Cook's work [is] we're constantly fighting a battle against a force larger than we are, and we're probably going to lose. That may sound like a pessimistic summation of these lively, apocalypse-tinged tales, but Cook mines the moments that precede the losses—when the battles are truly raging—and it's in them that she finds great beauty and strangeness…Cook traffics in absurd situations…but she does so to dramatize her very realistic concerns. We're not part of a system of infinite resources. We're not immortal. No clear paths exist to our desired destination, if we even know what that is. The paths may be dark, but they're strewn with meaning. And in the end, this collection suggests, meaning might be worth the battle.

The New York Times Book Review - Robin Romm

08/04/2014
The characters in Cook’s debut story collection inhabit isolated worlds, bubbles where scores of children are kidnapped and the police don’t notice; where, in keeping with the sharp title story, lost fishermen wait for rescue after a pleasure trip goes awry; and where unwanted boys take to a deserted forest and live out a Lord of the Flies–style tragedy. There’s also an intense fear of the outside world lurking throughout. In “Flotsam,” a woman considers installing an alarm system after random clothing regularly appears in her dryer. “Marrying Up” finds a woman constantly remarrying after her husbands are murdered by groups of riotous thugs occupying the outdoors. And “The Mast Year” chronicles the life of a young woman who, after a string of good fortune, becomes a talisman for the less privileged that arrive at her front door, hoping her luck will rub off. Quirkiness abounds, with several fairy-tale tropes thrown in for good measure (“A Wanted Man,” concerning a lothario known for impregnating neighborhood women, even begins, “There once was a man...”). Some stories jump off the page, others falter, yet all are oddly charming. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

What I like most about these stories is that many of them are dispatches from the end of the world, and it turns out to be a surprisingly familiar place.

Ira Glass

A dark pleasure...In ‘Meteorologist Dave Santana’ sex happens less often than the desperate, older woman (the meteorologist’s neighbor) would like. Cook is a young woman imagining an older woman’s need, and not charitably. But if Cook is anything like me, that desperate neighbor is herself. I’ve never really felt young.

Miranda July

Diane Cook’s writing is sharp, bawdy, bold and often hilarious. Her stories are refreshingly crude and her imagination is unbounded. Like her characters, Cook does what she wants. Her world is another universe, where people are wilder.

Rebecca Curtis

Diane Cook’s stories are like high-wattage bulbs strung across a sinister, dark land. Man V. Nature is equal parts dazzle and depth.

Ramona Ausubel

2014-08-13
Cook, who has worked on the radio show This American Life, debuts with 12 mercilessly in-your-face stories. Many exist in a parallel universe where nature and/or society has become a menacing force. A woman living in a prisonlike "shelter for widows and other unwanteds" narrates the only moderately horrifying opening story, "Moving On." Her Placement Team finds her a new husband once she starts following their rules for erasing memories of her past. The second story, "The Way the End of Days Should Be," plunges into an apocalyptic world where floodwaters rise unstoppably. No escape is possible in "It's Coming," either, though the menace here remains unnamed and therefore even more frightening. Both stories have victims/protagonists whose wealth and authority, not to mention careful preparations, prove useless. Water returns as a prime enemy, at least initially, in the title story about three men whose fishing vacation and friendships go horribly wrong when they can't find the supposedly nearby lakeshore. People's need for connection continually gets trampled. Dangerously needy crowds collect like moths around the flame of a young woman's good fortune in "The Mast Year." "Somebody's Baby" and "Marrying Up" evince primal maternal fears. In the former, a man steals babies whenever mothers let their guards down; in the latter, a woman's healthy baby and husband brutalize her. In "A Wanted Man," about loneliness more than sex, a man who can impregnate 50 women in a day is reminiscent of a TV Western gunslinger—admired, envied and marked by those who want to replace him. The erotic nature of teen friendship reaches demented lengths in "Girl on Girl." The strongest, relatively most realistic and hopeful story, "Meteorologist Dave Santana," follows a sexually predatory woman who stalks her neighbor for years while lying to herself that all she cares about is the chase. Cook's sharply honed prose packs an intellectual yet disturbing wallop. Be forewarned: Reading too many of these stories in one sitting may cause suicidal thoughts.

Kirkus Reviews

Beautifully written dystopian short story collection.

Jezebel

Masterly.

New York Times "Paperback Row"

When people ask me the desert island question, I usually say this is the book I’d bring...Her stories about survival amid the brutalities of nature are bracing primers for the apocalypse.

San Francisco Weekly

This past month I discovered Diane Cook and had many moments of story-delight, really just too many to count, because Diane Cook is that good. . . . Cook’s writing is lively and frank.

Impose Magazine

I couldn’t pry myself away from MAN V. NATURE . . . The stories are grim, violent, and darkly funny, but never so far removed from our most human urges to seem TOTALLY implausible.

"5 Great Books to Read in December" Buzzfeed

Hunger, despair, and perpetual awe for the collapsing natural world and the vulnerability of existence therein. Apply liberally before exposure to the elements. Contents include truth and other known allergens.

"28 Feminist Writers Recommend Books Every Man Sho Flavorwire

MAN V. NATURE is as close to experiencing a Picasso as literature can get: the worlds in Diane Cook’s impressive debut are bizarre, vertiginous, funny, pushed to the extreme-but just familiar enough in their nuances of the human condition to evoke an irresistible, around-the-corner reality.

Tea Obreht

This week, I have been reading the most astonishing book, MAN V. NATURE by Diane Cook. The stories are surreal, with the sharpest edge and in one way or another, each story reveals something raw and powerful about being human in a world where so little is in our control.

Roxane Gay

I couldn’t pry myself away from MAN V. NATURE . . . The stories are grim, violent, and darkly funny, but never so far removed from our most human urges to seem TOTALLY implausible.

Buzzfeed

Masterful…Each darkly comic modern fable reveals our societal preoccupations -- with status, sex, motherhood, belonging -- for what they really are: thin veneers over our ever-present animal selves, ready to crack at the merest provocation. A book that’ll grab your attention and keep you thinking.

Helene Wecker

Potent and unnerving…stark spookiness in the vein of Shirley Jackson and William Golding…[and] a lonely weirdness like that of Aimee Bender and George Saunders…Cook writes assuredly of archetypal terror and even more insightfully of hunger-for food, friendship, love, and above all, survival. A canny, refined, and reverberating debut.

Donna Seaman

This debut story collection takes the familiar narrative conflict and applies it to contemporary characters. The capriciousness of the natural world in Cook’s stories colors them with a Romantic, almost surreal light that fans of Megan Mayhew Bergman are sure to appreciate.

Huffington Post

Seethes with heat, rejection and twisted perception…I found myself enthralled by all of the stories in this collection. Not only are they surprising, but also fresh, funny, sad, often surreal and oddly true.

Omnivoracious

Hunger, despair, and perpetual awe for the collapsing natural world and the vulnerability of existence therein. Apply liberally before exposure to the elements. Contents include truth and other known allergens.

Flavorwire

MAN V. NATURE may be Diane Cook’s first book, but the former “This American Life” producer’s work is impressively precocious--making it our favorite short-story collection of October.

GQ

Irresistible reading...The author probes her characters’ psychological depths in weird and wonderful ways...With MAN V. NATURE Cook makes a bold, original debut.

San Jose Mercury News

[Cook] puts forth idiosyncratic and twisted conceits, but delivers the narrative goods when it comes to depicting the tragic, emotional lives of her characters… Like the best kind of fiction, the reader is left with much to think about within the broad realms of sex, death, love and friendship.

San Francisco Chronicle

Here’s a good rule: If Diane Cook wrote it, read it…Safety is tenuous, if not an illusion, in her thoughtful, unsettling, and darkly funny collection.

Boston Globe

Lively, apocalypse-tinged tales…Cook mines the moments that precede the losses-when the battles are truly raging-and it’s in them that she finds great beauty and strangeness…And, in the end, this collection suggests, meaning might be worth the battle.

New York Times Book Review

Man V. Nature could also be called Diane Cook V. The Challenges of Writing Fresh, Invigorating Fiction in Our Age. In the latter contest, Cook crushes. Here is a bold debut.

Sam Lipsyte