Scouting for the Reaper

by Jacob M Appel

Overview

Fiction. Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction Books of 2014. Each of the characters in SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER faces an unanticipated challenge: transporting a truckload of penguins across the country, arranging a proper Jewish burial for the remains of Gregor Samsa, and selling tombstones dressed as a Girl Scout. These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor.

"Jacob Appel's stories echo with secrets. There are the secrets we keep from those closest to us, of course. Our parents, our doctors, our clergy, our ex-wives and unrequited loves. Any run of the mill story has those. Good stories traffic in the kind of secrets we keep from ourselves. Why, for instance, what and who we love are so close in content and character to what we can't abide. Appel's that kind of trafficker. Even better, throughout this fine collection, he is most concerned with still another kind of secret: that which, when revealed, doesn't solve anything. Like the very best stories, they carry the mystery forward. Revelation, in the end, isn't an end at all. It's a beginning. SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER is full of such revelations. Here's hoping it signals the beginning of a long string of books penned by this talented polymath."—TJ Beitelman

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937854959
Publisher:	Black Lawrence Press
Publication date:	02/15/2014
Pages:	194
Sales rank:	135,071
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Jacob M. Appel is a doctor, lawyer, medical bioethicist, and a widely published fiction writer. In addition to THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET (Howling Bird Press, 2016), he has written nine books, including, most recently, MIRACLES AND CONUNDRUMS OF THE SECONDARY PLANET (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). His first novel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up, won the Dundee International Book Award in 2012. His short story collection SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) won the 2012 Hudson Prize. He has won the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, and many other honors. He has published short fiction in more than two hundred literary journals, including Agni, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and West Branch. Appel holds graduate degrees from Brown University, where he also taught for many years, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, Harvard Law School, New York University's MFA program in fiction, and Albany Medical College's Alden March Institute of Bioethics. A resident of New York, he currently teaches at the Gotham Writer's Workshop and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2014-04-04
In this collection of literary fiction, winner of the 2012 Hudson Prize, seven short stories explore secrets, lies and trust.Appel (Phoning Home: Essays, 2014, etc.) populates his stories with mostly ordinary people. But his characters, whether a truck driver or a professional folklorist, teenage or elderly, male or female, all tend to come up against a longing for trustworthiness. The title story begins with the knockout line: "Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform"—a mild piece of deception (Natalie, the narrator, is 13 and was never a Girl Scout) that hints at more complicated ones to follow. Over several visits, Natalie's father flirts with an old love, Delia Braithwaite, who's dying, while ostensibly selling her a headstone. When she finally says, "I trust you, Gordon," he trembles, as if suppressing a scream: "My father's tone shifted slowly from intimate to false intimate—the voice he used to clinch the bargain with his other customers." In these stories, trust can create distance as well as closeness, as can the truth. In "Choose Your Own Genetics," a lesson on blood typing discloses some unsettling news; even more unsettling is how the narrator's respected father, a geneticist, uses his superior knowledge to bully the teacher. Greta, the lonely, widowed central character in "Ad Valorem," decides to ignore what she knows to be true since she longs to trust. Part of trusting yourself is knowing your limits, or as the truck-driver narrator of "Hazardous Cargoes" puts it: "You've got to know your load. And you've got to know how far to carry it." Appel approaches his characters with compassion and an understanding of human frailty. In "The Extinction of Fairy Tales," another lonely character realizes when her lawn-care man stops showing up that she doesn't even know his last name, and she owes him a debt of gratitude: "She wanted to tell people that he was the man who'd buried her dog, but that sounded absolutely nutty out-of-context. There was the problem with human relationships—you could never really explain them." Luckily for readers, Appel can.A beautiful, well-balanced collection.

Kirkus Reviews