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Sign up todayA Perfect Universe
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Learn moreScott 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” (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.
Scott O’Connor is the author of the novella Among Wolves, and the novels Untouchable and Half World. He has been awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and his stories have been short-listed for the Sunday Times/EFG Story Prize and cited as Distinguished in Best American Short Stories. Additional work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Zyzzyva, The Rattling Wall, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Thérèse Plummer is an actor, award-winning voice-over artist, and counselor. She has won eighteen AudioFile Earphones Awards and has been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has appeared in a variety of television and film roles. As a counselor for adolescents, she spent five years using drama therapy techniques in individual and group settings.
Reviews
“Simply excellent. Narrators Bronson Pinchot and Therese Plummer are both captivating in their own right, bringing to life the finer points of the psychology of the characters…The narrations of both Pinchot and Plummer are nuanced, well considered, and tailored to each of the very human and complex characters. This narrative attention to detail brings the writing in these touching stories to life, complementing the author’s imagination and adding greater dimensionality. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
“The ten stories gathered here are remarkable…With the popularity of short-story collections on the rise, O’Connor’s addition to the ranks stands out and shines.”
"[A] sometimes wry, sometimes cutting story collection…entertaining stories accessible to all.”
“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.”
“O’Connor creates a world where everything feels precarious, on the verge of collapse…But, as O’Connor shows, our vices are what make us so delicately and chaotically human. A catalog of imperfections neatly packaged within a book.”
“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.”
“Scott O’Connor’s beautifully wrought stories are sharp-edged, unflinching, and filled with the kind of precision of language that etches images into the mind. His characters’ lives are ingeniously connected by a 70s cult sci-fi film, but what really binds them is the often heartbreaking and always surprising ways they attempt to find purchase in the world they inhabit, one which can feel as out of reach and inscrutable as the farthest star.”
“Through a kaleidoscopic cast of characters teeming with desires, hopes, frustrations, and regrets, the compelling stories in Thalassa excite the imagination while appealing to the heart. Scott O’Connor’s crystalline prose delivers an ambitious range of voices and narrative structures that reflect the bewildering complexity and quiet beauty of our modern world.”
“Scott O’Connor’s riveting exploration into the hopes, the losses, and triumphs of his characters plunges the reader into sprawling Los Angeles, where the entertainment business looms like an extra moon. A brilliant storyteller, O’Connor inhabits his characters and pulls us in after them, exploring lives in which everything is up for grabs and nothing is what you think.”
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